More than 6 weeks ago, I wrote a blog post about “Which country has the most OpenStreetMap GPS Points?“. You might remember that Russia and Germany provide the most OSM GPS points, as mentioned in the blog post.

Now, in a second step I created a worldwide grid, with an edge length of 15km, to show in more detail where the GPS points are located. The rendering of the tiles has been accomplished with the great TileMill software. Usually you would see some GPS noise in the grid cells above the equator. Thus, to eliminate this noise and to create a better overview, grid cells with less than 5 GPS points are made transparent. The following image shows an overview of Europe and the corresponding OSM GPS density. Of course you can also see some quite interesting and funny airplane, ferry or cruise routes.

However, I think the map overlay looks great and shows where the OSM GPS points are located. This information will also be published in the OSMatrix (thanks to Oliver Roick) within the next few days.

You can find my map here: http://resultmaps.neis-one.org/osmgps.html

PS: Below the map you will find a slider for the opacity of the GPS Grid Overlay, Enjoy!

thx @ maɪˈæmɪ Dennis for proofreading
thx @ *Fab* for creating the tiles/mapkey with MapBox’s TileMill

Some of you might already know that OpenStreetMap released a first bulk GPS point dataset last weekend. It contains almost 2.8 milliard (or for readers in the US 2.8 billion) points and is provided in its raw format, which means that only coordinate information is available for each point. Unfortunately it does not include any additional information or metadata. You can read more about it at the OSM Foundation Blog.

The first idea that came to my mind was a simple comparison analysis to answer the following questions: Where are all those points located and which country has the most GPS points? In a first try I conducted some results that showed that all points are distributed over 238 countries. For my analysis I used the OSM Mapnik world boundaries from the wiki. As you can see in the following pie chart, nearly 21% of the points are located in Russia (about 570 million points) and another 18% in Germany (about 500 million points). Does Russia have so many GPS points because of the country size or is the community just exceptionally active with GPS devices? However, the strange thing is that Germany is, with about 18%, “only” on the second place this time, weird isn’t it? 😉

I think overall these are some quite interesting numbers. We all hope to see some more metadata information in the OSM GPS point dataset soon.

thx @ maɪˈæmɪ Dennis & Good luck for next week!

*UPDATE* April 11th, 2012
The following map shows the OSM GPS points per 1000km²:

The second map shows the OSM GPS points per 1000 inhabitans: