As you may know by now, the Philippines have been struck by one of the largest Super Typhoons ever recorded. Many casualties are expected (especially in Tacloban) and even more people are in need of help. While some of us have been busy working with the “Stand By Task Force” to analyze and geolocate tweets with useful information, the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) has been making progress as well.
I have spent some time to develop a website that visualizes the latest changes to the OSM map (utilizing changesets) in the Philippines and hope that it helps to determine areas that might be already worked on, while other areas are lacking any new information. You can find the map here: http://resultmaps.neis-one.org/osm-typhoon-haiyan-2013

Additional information can also be found in the OSM Wiki and for all German fellows at the Wochennotiz blog, in case you are interested in actively contributing and helping the disaster response teams. Any mapping efforts are much appreciated!

Some statistics: Until midnight between Saturday and Sunday (November 9th/10th), almost 180 contributors made more than 245,000 map changes. On Sunday evening 6pm UTC (November 10th, 2013) the values increased to 245 volunteers who created nearly 440,000 map changes within the aforementioned extent. AWESOME, keep up that great work! Thank you.

Link to the website: http://resultmaps.neis-one.org/osm-typhoon-haiyan-2013

Some technical background information: The minutely changeset diff files are imported in a PostgreSQL database. The created website only visualizes the changesets which are within a predefined extent, i.e. the Philippines and some parts of the Vietnam coast. This extent is illustrated by a black line on the website. The OSM changeset data is updated on an hourly basis.

Thanks to maɪˈæmɪ Dennis

One and a half years ago (end of 2011), one of my open access publications (“Analyzing the Contributor Activity of a Volunteered Geographic Information Project — The Case of OpenStreetMap“) was published. It contained several interesting findings about the contributions made by the community of the OSM project. The results showed that the community follows a particular pattern that many other online community based projects tend to struggle with too. Only a small number of the members really contribute in a meaningful way to the project. Additionally, the publication illustrated how many contributors are located in Europe and other areas of the world and how and where mappers contribute data over a certain period time.

I thought it was time to update this information with some new statistics. Between the end of 2011 and July 2013 the number of registered OSM members has increased more than two-an-a-half times to almost 1.34 Mio. Based on the freely available changeset dump of the project it is quite easy to check how many members created at least one changeset and thus hopefully made an edit to the database. The following figure shows the increase of registered members and the aforementioned results of the analysis of the changeset dump of July 31st, 2013.

By the end of 2011 almost 43% of the 505,000 registered members created at least one changeset. This number decreased by July 2013 to only 26% (355,000) of the 1.34 Mio registered members. As some of you already know, the real-number of actual contributors is also far below this. I decided to look into this in a little bit more detail and created some diagrams that show the number of changesets and active contributors per month. We can see a few events that had an impact on the numbers in the diagrams. First, the license-change in April 2012 followed by the run of the redaction bot in July 2012 (HDYC-profile) and at the end the release of the new OSM iD editor in May 2013. The number of changesets has not changed a lot when comparing current (July, 2013) numbers with prior months of last year.

The last diagram of this blog post shows the active contributors per month. The collected information tells us that the total number of “long-time” contributors is increasing whereas the number of “new” contributors is more or less on the same level in recent months.

It is also interesting to see an impact of “new” members in the month before the license change (March, 2012). Anyway, for the last one and a half years the number of active contributors per month is consistent with a total number between 19,000 and 23,000. What do you think?

You will find additional OSM editor usage statistics (by Oli-Wan) in the OSM Wiki. Also, it is interesting to see that currently the number of newly registered members is only growing between 700 and 900 per day. In the time before August, 2013 is was between 3,000 and 4,000 per day! Did anyone change something in the registration process at OSM.org, e.g. a new security/login mechanism during account creation?

Thanks to maɪˈæmɪ Dennis

PS: Happy 9th Birthday OpenStreetMap!

Last year we wrote a journal paper in which we analyzed the OpenStreetMap (OSM) dataset of the United States which was published on May 28th, 2013 in the Transactions in GIS Journal. You can download a free pre-print version here. This paper has been published just on time to add to the discussion at the upcoming State of the Map United States conference which will take place in San Francisco and includes some presentations about data imports to OSM. Unfortunately, Dennis and I cannot attend the conference this year, so we decided to write a blog post with some additional and up-to-date numbers.

In January there was an announcement on the OSM mailing list that in the past few months many connectivity errors in the United States OSM dataset had been fixed. Probably a lot of these fixes can be attributed to Martijn’s Maproulette website or to Geofabrik’s OSM Inspector (OSMI) Routing View. However, a short discussion started on the mailing list about the total number of errors that are left and how long it would take to fix all those errors. Thus, we downloaded four OSM planet files dated Jan 4th 2012, June 13th 2012, Jan 2nd 2013 and Jun 2nd 2013 to get some new results. After cutting the United States dataset from the planet files, we used the same algorithm as utilized in OSMI’s Routing View, to receive some stats about the street network of the US datasets.

First of all the, the following image shows the number of errors for each dataset that we included in the analysis. The errors that were detected are separated into unconnected and duplicate ways. You can find some additional information about both error types here.

As you can see, the number of unconnected OSM ways has been rapidly reduced in the past 17 months from around 141,000 to 19,000. The number of “duplicate way” errors has been reduced from 17,500 to 11,500. You can find the exact numbers in the following table and an updated error layer on the mentioned OSMI website. In certain cases the duplicate way error created several errors for one and the same way. For these particular cases the number of unique OSM way IDs were counted.

Date – Unconnected Ways – Duplicate Ways

• Jan 4th, 2012 – 141,578 – unique 17,563 (overall errors: 535,923)
• June 13th, 2012 – 145,468 – unique 17,977 (overall errors: 518,536)
• Jan 2nd, 2013 – 15,911 – unique 12,287 (overall errors: 257,388)
• Jun 2nd, 2013 – 19,073 – unique 11,582 (overall errors: 220,451)

Overall the length of the US street network did not really change a lot. At the beginning of 2012 it was around 11.07 million km while in 2013 it is 11.1 million km, which means an increase of around 30,000 km. The following image shows the distribution of the US street network divided by different OSM road classes.

The length of the residential roads is still decreasing (-496,000 km), similar to what we saw during the analysis for our paper, while the length of the other road types (+276,000 km) and secondary/tertiary roads (+205,000 km) is increasing. This is the result of a massive retagging process of the imported TIGER/Line dataset in OSM. Dennis mentioned this already in his SotM US 2012 presentation. Motorways also experienced an increase of around +44,000 km in 2012. You will find some additional, quite interesting statistics, charts and of course maps in the aforementioned journal publication. In particular a few more thoughts and facts about the effect and impact of data imports on OSM can be found in our research study about the United States OSM dataset.

Since April 23th, 2013 each visitor, user or contributor of the OpenStreetMap (OSM) project can “add a note” to the map in order to easily mark an error or missing object in the map data. You can find more information about this new feature in the OSM wiki. It is a great new way for people to contribute to the project by improving the data in a simple way. To provide a better overview I created a new webpage which shows some statistics about the new feature. You can find it here: resultmaps.neis-one.org/osm-notes

Besides some general information the webpage also shows the overall, opened and closed number of notes per country. The second table illustrates the OSM contributors who already opened, commented or closed a note. All tables on the page are sortable by clicking on the column headers.

Additionally I integrated the individual contributor note stats to the OSM personal profiles @ “How did you contribute to OpenStreetMap?“. The following image shows the new add-on, of course with Harry, our guinea pig No. 1, and as always, great work here too! 🙂

¡Muchas gracias 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

The wait is over! As I mentioned in December, I have been working on an interactive online map, which shows you all volunteers of the OpenStreetMap world on a map. The first three layers contain the activity center of a contributor, her or his first created and latest modified node. The algorithm to determine the activity area of an OSM volunteer has been described in my publication here. I should mention that I used all changeset centers instead of all created nodes of a contributor. This way the computations don’t take as long and the process can be repeated every week based on the weekly OSM changeset dump.

The above image shows the created map for the center of London. As you can see, there are several Mapper-Types to choose from on the left side. Each mapper type is distinguished by the number of changesets that were created (shown in parentheses). However, most of the time you will see many orange or red figures on the map , which means that the OSM project has a lot of members who only made a few changes. This “issue” or “phenomenon” has also been mentioned in the publication.

Below the map you can find additional information which shows the current number of mappers in your map’s bbox. Sometimes the number is a little bit larger than the real number of contributors in your area. This depends on the method that Openlayers uses to load the mappers from my server onto the map. For the next update, I maybe plan to add the dates of the latest contribution of a member. This way you can get current information about the number of (active) contributors for your area.

The data will be updated on a daily and weekly base. It is also important to mention that each layer has a limit of 1.000 contributors to show on the map. Thus, if you zoom out, you will always see contributors, but sometimes the real number is much higher than the number of mapper icons you see on the map.

Last but not least some stats: Today (Jan 6th, 2012) the OpenStreetMap project has  reached 1 000 000 registered members. Around 300 000 (30%) of all contributors created at least one changeset and about 200 000 (20%) volunteers created at least one Node.  Of the 300 000 contributors who created at least one changeset, around 240 000 created less than 10 changesets, 45 000 (4.5%) between 10 and 100 changesets and 17 000 more than 100 changesets. I think this amount of 17 000 mappers or 1.7% of all registered members is obviously the amount of active OSM members. This is also comparable with the official OSM “highly active users” stats from here.

The map is online here:
Overview of OpenStreetMap Contributors aka Who’s around me?

¡Muchas gracias maɪˈæmɪ Dennis!

After my latest updates to the “How did you contribute to OpenStreetMap?” website, some users asked me if I could add the new OSM gravatar to it. Starting today, you can find your OSM-gravatar from your OSM user website on HDYC too. If your HDYC-profile doesn’t show a gravatar yet, please be patient. It will be automatically updated as soon as you make any type of OSM edit to the OSM database. The following figure contains all updates that were made to the website marked with a circle. As always, Harry is our example 😉

As a second update, I added the number of changes that were made in a user’s changeset and grouped them into three classes. This way the website shows if a user only makes a lot of changesets with 15 or less edits, more than 150 edits or something in between. Last but not least, you can find some additional information about the number of ways of which the user is the last modifier, including its way tag. This provides some information about the data collection tendency of the contributor, for instance if the user only creates a lot of buildings or large landuse areas.

Check all updates here: How did you contribute to OpenStreetMap?

Ps: You can also find the total number of countries in your profile in which you contributed at least one node.

Muchas Gracias @ maɪˈæmɪ aka Oleta River State Park Dennis 🙂

Two years ago, we created some maps which showed you the number of users per country for a timeframe of one month. Maybe some of you remember that the highest concentration of active contributors in relation to the countries’ population could be found in Europe. We thought it was about time to make some new maps to see if things have changed. The following map shows you the number of active contributors per day per country.

Similar to our results two years ago, the above map only gives some general information about the total number of users per country and does not consider the population for each country. Therefore we created a second map which shows you the relation between active users and the population in each country per day.

Overall the maps show a slightly similar activity pattern of the OSM users as in our previous results two years ago. The major concentration of the project still lies in Europe expanding more and more to the east. However, you can see certain changes in other areas of the world too. First improvements have been made in Africa, South America and South-East Asia. Greenland of course is looking quite exceptional due to the low population value.

So, what do you think? Where are you located and how would you describe the mapping activity development in your country?

***Update: Nov. 20th, 2012***

My last update about the HDYC website is a few months old now. For those readers who do not know what HDYC is: “How did you contribute to OpenStreetMap?” is a webpage which shows you in detail how long, when, where a member of the OSM project contributed to the project and which tools she/he used.

This time I added some new stats and graphs to the site. One of my favorite new features is the location information which shows the countries in which a contributor created at least one OSM Node:

A second new feature shows how long the mapper is already registered with the project and how many *active* mapping days she/he had:

You can also find some more information about the changesets of the user e.g. the number of changesets with a comment, the number of unique changeset comments and the median character length of the comments. Additionally, you will also see some information about deleted nodes, ways or relations:

Some of you might know about Richard Weait’s “Mapper Baseball Cards” idea. I added a similar graph to the end of the page to show which editors have been used by the mapper (thx Richard for the idea).

You will also see some facts about how many traces a user has uploaded to the OSM project and how many user blocks he received or if a user block is still active. Most of the stats are updated on a daily basis while the changeset stats will be updated once per week (which depend on the changeset dump).

Maybe we should create a “Hall of Fame” of OSM Contributors?

1. Contributor with most visited countries? -> mikelmaron ?
2.  Most active contributor? -> Zambelli Limitada ?
3.  … any other ideas?

However, I hope you like it!? Have fun …
>> http://hdyc.neis-one.org <<

thx @ maɪˈæmɪ Dennis for proofreading

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