The OpenStreetMap (OSM) project celebrated its 10th anniversary in August 2014. For almost 10 years it has increased its number of registered members. Even though some contributors stopped their contributions to the project, each day new mappers start collecting features for the free wiki world map (aka database).

In my last contributor report in 2013, the OSM project had a total of 1.3 Mio registered members. For July 2014 this number has increased to almost 1.6 Mio registered members. Similarly to last year, I checked how many contributors created one or more than ten changesets or performed more than 10 map edits. This information can be retrieved from the changeset dump.

The figure above reveals a similar trend to the ones we saw in the past few years: Less than 1/3 of the 1.6 Mio registered members actively contribute to the project (450,000 members). Furthermore, only a small group of 16% (270,000) or respectively 6% (100,000) of the contributors performed more than 10 edits or 10 changesets.

The long-term motivation of the contributors is quite important too. Therefore, similarly to the methods that we presented in our open access publication, I created a figure, which visualizes the increase in monthly volunteer numbers over the past few years and the consistencies in data contributions.

As we already revealed in our study, only half of the monthly active members in OSM are also long-term contributors. Also, the previously discussed pattern which depicts a contributor loss of almost 70% over the years is again visible. However, it is good to see that at least some “senior” mappers still keep contributing to the OSM project.

Thanks to maɪˈæmɪ Dennis

One month ago I wrote a blog post about a new website which allows you to see other OpenStreetMap contributors in your area. Overall the feedback was very positive, thank you very much for that! However, now it is time for a new extension to the “How did you contribute to OpenStreetMap?” (HDYC) webpage. As I mentioned in my last blog post, I used an algorithm (which is described in a paper that I wrote here) to compute and determine the activity area of a contributor based on her/his changeset centers. The following figure shows the new function that was added to the HDYC website visualizing the activity area of a contributor! Sorry Harry, as always you have to be our guinea pig, but you have a really awesome activity area 🙂

Next to the visualization of the overall activity area of a contributor, you can also click on a link at the bottom of the map to switch to the contributors’ activity area of the past six months. Furthermore, all maps on HDYC now use the great Leaflet map library instead of Openlayers. Also, your activity areas’ first and last Nodes have a direct link to the “Overview of OpenStreetMap Contributors aka Who’s around me?” webpage. This provides an easy way to locate other contributors in your area. I have to mention that not every contributor has an activity area for the past six months. It highly depends on the activity of the contributor within this time frame!

One more thing: The aforementioned “Who’s around me?” webpage has three new overlays. Two overlays show the contributors of the past six months with their first and last Nodes and one additional layer shows the activity areas also based on the past six months for each contributor. You can find all new layers in the upper right corner in the so-called “Layerswitcher”.

My HDYC database is updated more or less on a daily basis. The information about your changeset activities is updated once a week (based on the weekly changeset dumps from here). “The Created Nodes per Country”-section can only be updated when a new full history dump is available, but you can always find the latest date in the section-label. The “Who’s around me?” webpage uses almost the same database as HDYC, so the data up-to-dateness is similar.

Have fun with the new gadgets!

¡Muchas gracias maɪˈæmɪ Dennis

A few months ago, Frederik Ramm posted an idea on the German OpenStreetMap mailing list about a new (stochastic) approach to OSM data quality assurance. You can find his original German post here. His idea was to create a way to allow users to “like” or “dislike” a specific region on the OSM map, a function that other popular websites such as YouTube or Facebook implemented to allow users to provide feedback to videos or status updates. For OSM this particular function could give some indicators or trends about the OSM map data.

I really liked his idea and in collaboration with Frederik I created an Open Source OpenLayers plugin. For all new readers: OpenLayers is an Open Source library which can implement a dynamic (OSM) map into more or less any webpage. One of our goals was to make the integration of the ILikeOSM plugin as easy as adding a tile server to your OpenLayers map.

The following image shows the plugin in more detail, including the “like” and “dislike” buttons to provide feedback about the area on the map.

An additional feature of the plugin shows how many users have been viewing the same area of the map that the current user is taking a look at. More precisely: How many other users have been viewing a similar area of the map within the past two minutes with a zoom level of +-3 to yours. All components of the plugin are Open Source and available on github. The database which saves the likes and dislikes is running on a German OSM Dev server. A database dump file can be downloaded on a daily basis. It is important to note at this point that no private data is saved in the database when a user leaves his or her feedback. The plugin only saves an independent, randomly generated user ID, the feedback type i.e. thumbs up/down, the zoom level, the layer name and the bounding box of the map section. A map view is generally not saved to the database until the user accepts to do so via a pop up window.

Do you like this feature?
It is quite easy to integrate it into your own webpage. Here is how it works:
1. Add the following line below your OpenLayers script-tag:
<script src=”http://ilike.openstreetmap.de/ILikeOSM.min.js” type=”text/javascript”></script>
2. Then add the following lines to your OpenLayers Controls:
new OpenLayers.ILikeOSM()
3. Styling
<style type="text/css">
div.olILikeOSM { position: absolute; top: 15px; left: 50px; padding: 7px; color:white; border-radius: 10px; background: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.6); }
div.olILikeOSM a { color: white; font-size:12px; text-decoration: underline; }
</style>
4. That’s it!

What is the benefit of this plugin or of the saved ILikeOSM data?
Based on the saved likes, dislikes and map views we can generate some statistics to provide you with information about the number of people who like or dislike your particular area of interest. Maybe we can even see some prove of Linu’s law “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow”; meaning in this case, that a larger number of users that check a certain region of the map, results in “better” OSM data quality. As a first prototype, I generated a static webpage which shows an example result map.

Further ideas?
The plugin could potentially be expanded with an additional textbox in which a user could leave a comment why the area is not well represented in OSM. This information could then be saved e.g. in OpenStreetBugs. Anyway, we think that the current version of the plugin could provide some very useful information. You will find a webpage with all information, examples and downloads here: http://ilike.openstreetmap.de As a first step we integrated the plugin into the OpenStreetMap Germany webpage.

Frederik will give a short talk about the ILikeOSM plugin at the upcoming State of the Map 2012 in Tokyo. If our proposed session abstract about another topic for the State of the Map 2012 US gets accepted, Dennis will try to present it there too.

Thank you very much for your feedback: Frederik, Jonas, Dennis, Sven & Marc

Last weekend Frederik and Richard asked me if I could give some additional information on the „How did you contribute to OpenStreetMap?“ webpage. So here we go. Below the prior, familiar chart which shows the contributions per month, you will find two new charts. The first one shows the number of changesets per weekday and the second one the number of changesets per hour.

Additionally I added an output that roughly estimates what type of mapper the contributor is, based on his/her number of contributions (changesets). However, I will give no warranty regarding the group or type of mapper that each individual contributor falls into and I think you will figure out the different groups of mappers by yourself anyway 😉

The following picture highlights the new things on my webpage:

Most of you already know it, you will find “How Did You Contribute to OpenStreetMap?” here: http://hdyc.neis-one.org

thx @ Frederik & Richard for the idea
thx @ maɪˈæmɪ Dennis

*Update* (2020-06-11) What are the different requirements for your #HDYC type of #mapper? See

The German OpenStreetMap project webpage has been online for three years now. During these years several small updates have been made to the page. But it is about time to create a complete new webpage with a “state of the art” layout and style. Jonas created the first drafts of a possible new design of the site a while ago. Unfortunately he hasn’t had enough time to finish his work, but luckily Fabian and Pascal came up with a new webpage. Both of them considered Jonas first draft during the development and expanded it with their own ideas.

The new site is based on HTML, CSS and Twitter-bootstrap. Most of the content has been taken from the old webpage with minor improvements. In their opinion the biggest change lies within the way the users are welcomed to the page with information such as: “What is OpenStreetMap?“, “How can I help?” or “How can I use the data?“. The following image shows the important changes made to the welcome-page:

The map has moved to a different web location, but on the welcome-page you will find a large icon that is linked to the map. Similar to the old map, all German local groups are displayed as an overlay. Furthermore, they integrated the OSM Nominatim address search and two buttons in the header of the page, so users can notify the community about bugs or edit the map.

A big shout out to all the people who gave us their feedback (Jonas, Jochen, Frederik, Marc, Matthias & the WN-Team). Special thanks to Fabian who implemented most of the new site.

You can find the new webpage starting from today at the old URL: http://openstreetmap.de
We hope that you like it! What do you think?

Einen deutschen Blog Post findet ihr hier: http://blog.openstreetmap.de/2011/11/neue-osmde-webseite/

thx @ maɪˈæmɪ Dennis

Last weekend I discovered that two guys created a new statistic webpage for the OpenStreetMap project. Both guys did a really nice job! You can find a bunch of information about OSM members, nodes, ways and relations (1) on their webpage. In particular you can find sums of registered or active OSM members or amounts of OSM nodes, ways and relations and their daily activity (2). Further, for most of the information, you can find weekly, monthly and yearly graphs (with tooltips!)(3). The stats are created every night.

Personally, I like the graph of the “daily active members”. Did you know that in the majority of cases more relations have been modified then created? You can see this in the relations “daily created/modified/deleted” graph.

I’m sure you will find some other interesting trends. Notice: It seems that they started this site at the beginning of October 2011, thus most of the information is only available starting at this particular date. Up to now I only knew of the “official” stats webpage here. However, a really big thanks to the “lost” guys (aka Santos & El Loco) … 🙂

The website is online here: http://osmstats.altogetherlost.com

thx @ maɪˈæmɪ Dennis

During my really great vacation in Sweden I had some time to do some further adjustments to the well-known “Your OSM Heatmap“-webpage. For the new readers: “Your OSM Heatmap” shows the contributions of an OpenStreetMap user as a heatmap overlay. You can find my blog post with some more information here.

However, I think it would be a fantastic idea to add a time slider to the webpage. You can find it now below the map! The year of your first and last contribution is on the left and right end of the slider. With the slider you can visualize your OSMtastic-work over time. The following image shows the webpage including the time slider:

As a second feature you can now use, beside your OSM heatmap-link, the permalink of the map to point to an individual position of your heatmap! Finally I have updated the data for the webpage with the latest OSM changesets. Overall the heatmaps for about 150 000 contributors are available. Remember: Not *every* registered OSM member did contribute to the project.

So, who has an awesome OSM HeatMap time-travel? >> http://yosmhm.neis-one.org

thx @ maɪˈæmɪ Dennis

Maybe some of you remember that I conducted a comparison analysis between three OpenStreetMap (OSM) routing engine APIs (CloudMade, MapQuest Open and OSRM) and G**gle Maps API last week. You can find the results in my blog post here. As I mentioned in the article, I wanted to try to do a second analysis with more routing engines.

Thus, I added Bing Maps and two OSM engines (YourNavigation/YOURS and Routino/Roadeeno) to the comparison. All services have a continental coverage with the exception of OSRM. The following table shows an overview of (1) the request-response time of the service, (2) the calculated distance for the test-route and (3) the file size of the service response:

As you can see in the following diagram does the OSM routing engine (OSRM) give the fastest results. A little bit strange is that the Routino/Roadeeno service returns no valid route responses for requests which are longer than 600 km.

The same diagram in a more detailed view:

The routing engines have different ping times (round-trip time). Almost all services have a round-trip time off about 25 ms. You can see the times for each engine in the following diagram:

If you take those ping times into account and use a logarithmic transformation, the result look as shown below:

The above diagram shows in a quite impressive way the results of this comparison that allow the following conclusions: OSRM (OSM) shows the fastest results followed by G**gle Maps (Tele Atlas). Bing (Navteq), MapQuest (OSM) and CloudMade (OSM) are nearly equal in most cases. YOURS (OSM) and Routino (OSM) seem not to be the right choices at least for long route calculations (>600km). Maybe a second comparison with several routes between 10 and 500 km could be an enhancement?

thx @ maɪˈæmɪ Dennis 🙂

In Salzburg (Österreich) fand dieses Jahr wieder vom 6. bis zum 8. Juli die AGIT statt. Die AGIT ist eine Konferenz für angewandte Geoinformatik, welche bereits seit 1989 stattfindet. Dieses Jahr dürfte sie wohl wieder einen neuen Besucherrekord erreicht haben, mit angeblich knapp 1200 Teilnehmern.

Wie im letzten Jahr gab es auch dieses Jahr am Mittwochnachmittag wieder ein Spezialforum für OpenStreetMap mit insgesamt drei Sessions. Sie bestanden jeweils aus drei Vorträgen über/mit oder wegen OpenStreetMap. Aber nicht nur innerhalb dieses Forums, auch in einigen anderen Sessions, wovon es teilweise insgesamt 10 parallel über die Veranstaltungstage verteilt gab, wurden OSM Daten immer wieder in unterschiedlichen Varianten verwendet. Angefangen von der Verwendung zur Erstellung von Karten, wie auch als Datengrundlage für Routenplaner, die Verwendung von GPS-Tracks zur Ermittlung des Verkehrsaufkommens oder wie in meinem Vortrag, zur Darstellung von Verkehrswarnmeldungen.

Für mich persönlich war es gerade am Mittwochnachmittag interessant zu hören, dass in Wien noch weitere amtliche Geodaten freigegeben werden und andere Ämter, zumindest in Österreich, über die Freigaben ihrer Geodaten nachdenken. Auch im Vortrag vom LVG-Bayern über die Luftbildfreigabe in Bayern, die unter anderem auch für das Abdigitaliseren für OSM verfügbar waren/sind, gab es Aussagen das gerne immer wieder neue Orthopohots freigegeben werden.

Was meiner Meinung nach vor ein paar Jahren irgendwie noch undenkbar war, wird langsam Realität: Behörden in Österreich oder auch Deutschland geben ihre Geodaten frei oder sprechen zumindest offiziell darüber sie zu veröffentlichen!

Ich sehe hier ein wirklich großes Potential gerade für OpenStreetMap im Bereich der Qualitätsvervollständigung, Qualitätsanalyse und vor allem in der immer wieder nachgefragten Qualitätssicherung. Aber nicht nur OpenStreetMap würde davon profitieren, so wie im LVG-Bayern Vortrag von offizieller Seite zu hören, haben auch die Ämter viele positive Effekte durch die Verwendung von OSM Daten bei ihrer Arbeit. Ingesamt also eine absolute Win-Win-Situation? Warten wir mal ab, was sich bis zur nächsten AGIT 2012 in Salzburg noch so alles ergibt …

This article was written in the ICE720 from Munich to Frankfurt, with a delay of 22min.
Thanks for travelling with Deutsche Bahn!

First of all, I really like the following blog post and the idea behind it: “Yes! It is possible to cross Dublin without passing a pub”

It shows the power of crowd sourced geodata (OpenStreetMap) and the skills of some individuals. In the following steps I am going to show you a different way to get to the same result.

The website OpenRouteService.org offers the same functionality to calculate a route. You can avoid certain areas by defining them (just simply draw them) on the map. However, your first step would be to “Search for Points of Interest (POI)” (PUBS), for example in Dublin within a distance of 10 km. The following picture shows the result:

After that you can create several polygons around your pubs resulting in a map with several, “red” areas:

And finally you can calculate a route from almost any point in Dublin. The last image show such a route without crossing a red area or Pub:

However, the original blog post is brilliant !
Or do you want it the opposite way: Search all pubs *along* my route? 😉

thx @ maɪˈæmɪ Dennis 🙂