The OSM project still records around 650 new contributors each day (out of almost 5,000 registered members per day). Some countries (such as Belgium or Spain) already provide platforms to coordinate the introduction to OSM for new mappers. Others use special scripts or intense manual work to send the newly registered contributors mails with useful information (Washington or The Netherland). However, oftentimes new contributors make, as expected, beginner-mistakes. Personally, I often detect unconnected ways, wrong tags or rare fictive data. Unfortunately, sometimes (new) members also delete, intentionally or unintentionally, existing map data.

At the end of 2014, many people were anticipating the newly introduced changeset discussions feature. A few months later, I developed a page that finds the latest discussions around the world or in your country. By now, many OSM members use changeset discussions for commenting or questioning map edits of other members.

However, one year ago, almost to the day, I wrote a blog post about a webpage for detecting suspicious OSM edits. In the newly updated version, I would like to combine the aforementioned changeset discussions and comments about suspicious edits to communicate with members in a more direct way. The following image shows the revised webpage.

Furthermore you can request all changesets of a contributor, which have been commented on. The same page can also show all comments written by a selected contributor (with all comments of the particular changeset). I think the last both features are really helpful for keeping control over your own and other changeset discussions. This should also simplify the reviewing process of changesets and map edits.

As mentioned at the beginning of this blog post, some OSM groups send a welcoming e-mail to new contributors. I also saw that some mappers are welcoming new members in Taiwan with a changeset comment and information on their first changeset. Pretty neat stuff if you ask me.

Latest OSM Changeset Discussions: http://resultmaps.neis-one.org/osm-discussions
Find Suspicious OSM Changesets: http://resultmaps.neis-one.org/osm-suspicious

Thanks to maɪˈæmɪ Dennis.

The first book about the OpenStreetMap (OSM) project was written by Frederik Ramm and Jochen Topf, two well-known OSM enthusiasts, in 2008. The first version was in German which was later translated into an improved English version. It contains similar information as can be found in the book by Jonathan Bennett, which was published in 2010, detailing how the projects’ geodata is collected, which editors can be used, some explanations about tags, key and values and how the rendering stack works. Both books are great resources to learn about the OSM basics and to get an overview about useful software.

However, besides these more technical books, the research community has been very active in recent years and has published several articles about OSM data quality, conflation attempts with other datasets or about the contributors of the project. Each of us (Dennis Zielstra and I) wrote a dissertation with different aspects about crowd-sourced geodata and the OSM project: Dennis’ work is about OSM data quality in comparison to proprietary and governmental data with emphasis on pedestrian shortest path routing and data imports. Pascal’s work tackled the issue of how user-generated geodata can be utilized for disabled people friendly route planning. Both dissertations contain more than 13 publications in total.

Now the important part for you: Both dissertations are now freely available. You can download Dennis’ work here and Pascal’s thesis here: Combined more than “480” pages about the OpenStreetMap project!

What can you expect from our dissertations? Our work had to be more science oriented (after all they had to fulfill the strict guidelines our universities gave us to get the PhD). This means it contains a bunch of information that can be useful to other researchers; for example, methods to analyze geodata quality or an introduction on parameters that are important for disabled people in a road network. However, we always tried to make the results and findings always as understandable to the general public as possible. We always felt that VGI research about an open source project such as OSM should not only generate results that are so convoluted that only a hand-full of researchers worldwide would understand the concepts in the end. Any OSM contributor should have a benefit from the findings that are published in those dissertations and we hope we accomplished this goal. We also wished we could have published each publication in open source journals to make the results freely available to everyone but this is a whole new topic for a different blog post. Anyway, by providing the dissertations for free we basically accomplished this task now too.

And what can you not you expect from our work? We do not describe how your object of interest should be tagged or how you should run a mapping event. We feel there are already enough sources out there that tackle these issues.

Anyway, we bet that you will find some information in the dissertations about the OSM project which you have not heard about yet, such as the evolution of the German or the United States OSM street network, analyses about data imports or several research projects about contributor behavior, vandalism detection and a quite comprehensive overview about recent developments and future trends in VGI research in general.

Let us know what you think and enjoy the information overload 🙂

Dennis & Pascal (@pascal_n)

Maybe some of you are already familiar with “OSMstats”, a website that provides numerous statistics about the OpenStreetMap (OSM) project. The site was created and is maintained by the two guys at altogetherlost.com. However, OSMstats has now been moved to the ResultMaps domain at osmstats.neis-one.org. I added several new features too. First of all, you can now select a specific date for your stats. Secondly, the main menu panel has been extended with a new entry for statistical information about OSM changesets.

Additionally, the graphs for the country statistics, the active members and daily edits are also available in a “year”-overview. I hope you like the new extensions. A big thanks to both guys at altogetherlost.com who originally created OSMstats!

OSMstats is now available at: http://osmstats.neis-one.org
Feel free to check out my Resultmaps too which offer many helpful and funny OSM tools: http://resultmaps.neis-one.org

Notice: OSMstats was introduced in 2011, this means the webpage cannot provide statistics prior to that year. Also, the newly created Changeset-Tab has only data for July, 2014 and after.

Thanks to maɪˈæmɪ Dennis

The OpenStreetMap project keeps attracting more and more new members that register and start contributing their data to the project. In one of my last blog posts I presented a website which shows the location of each new and active member based on one of their first edits. Since the launch of this website, some of you asked me about a potential opportunity to feed this information for a particular area. Well, there you go!

You can create your own bbox of interest to determine the area in which you would like to be informed about new members. All you need is the center coordinates (lon & lat) of your area. The following URL is an example for Berlin (Germany):
http:// resultmaps.neis-one.org/newestosmfeed.php?lon=13.3&lat=52.5&deg=1

The “deg” parameter is used to specify the length (degrees) of your bbox. This means that with a “deg” value of 1, a distance of about 111km in each direction from your center point will be determined to create the bbox. This value of 1 degree also represents the maximum distance possible. The resulting Atom feed contains all new members of the past 7 days that made at least one change in you predefined area [1]. Some additional information about each new member was added too [2]. The database will be updated every morning between 6 and 7am CET.

*Update*
On the following webpage you can create your own personal osm feed in a few simple steps: http://resultmaps.neis-one.org/newestosmcreatefeed.php

Enjoy!

thx @ maɪˈæmɪ Dennis

Since past Friday the OpenStreetMap project has more than 600 000 registered members. As many of you may know, not every new registered member starts contributing to the project right away. Based on my “How did you contribute to OSM?” database I created a small (but neat) webpage which shows where the newest registered OpenStreetMap (OSM) members made one of their first edits. The following image shows a screenshot of the new webpage:

The visualized data will be updated on a daily basis. At the moment there are two layers available: one layer displays the latest members of the past two days, while the other layer does the same for the past seven days. At lower zoom-levels the icons are clustered and only show the number of new members. However, on higher zoom-levels you can click on the individual icons to get further information about the new project member. Thanks to Stamen for their really nice looking watercolor map. Would you like to see more statistics about the number of new contributors for each individual country?

The new webpage is online here: http://resultmaps.neis-one.org/newestosm.php

thx @ maɪˈæmɪ Dennis

Many blog posts reported in the last few weeks about Google’s changes to their Google Maps API and the new usage limits. If a website that implemented the Google Maps API receives too much traffic or hits e.g. more than 25,000 per day, charges will apply [1]. This news caused some websites to start looking for alternatives and some of them switched to the OpenStreetMap (OSM) project. You can read more about how and why you should also switch to OSM on the great switch2osm.org webpage.

As maybe some of you already know two prominent examples that switched to OSM within the past two weeks are Foursquare and Apple. You can read more about Foursquare’s switch here and about Apple here. Richard Fairhurst wrote a few days ago (on March 8th [2]) that the OSM Project was experiencing a nice boost in several categories such as:

• more map tiles than usual that have been requested
• new members on the OSM IRCs asking on how to make changes to the OSM data
• a higher peak of OSM publicity
• and as Kai Krueger [3] mentioned it seemed that several new users contributed to OSM.

I would like to add a few numbers especially to the last point mentioned above. Foursquare announced their switch to OSM on Feb. 29th, 2012. Before this announcement the OSM project would usually experience a growth of around 500 (+/- 200) new registered members every day in February. Out of these new members approximately 180 (+/- 50) contribute their first edit in OSM. Overall around 2100 +/- 100 members were active each day in February [4].

However, these numbers changed the first day after the Foursquare announcement. The OSM project had an increase of around 1600 new members during that day (March 1st), and on the second day about 1100 new members joined OSM. On March 3rd the numbers went down to the usual 600 new registered members again. Out of those newly registered members during the first day after the Foursquare announcement about 700, at the second day about 450 and on March 3rd 250 members started to contribute to the project.

After Apple switched to OSM on March 8th the daily new member numbers started to increase again. On March 8th 1400, March 9th 1800 and yesterday 1000 new members registered to the OSM project. About 560 of the new members that joined on March 8th, 780 that joined on March 9th and 400 members that joined yesterday started to actively contribute to the project [5].

The following picture from OSMstats shows the increase in the amount of daily active OSM members:

Source: http://osmstats.altogetherlost.com

So far we can say that due to the announcements the OSM project gets an above average boost on new registered members. It looks like more active users contribute to the OSM project each day, which is a good development! We will see within the next few days and weeks, if more people will not only use the OSM data but also contribute new objects …

thx @ maɪˈæmɪ Dennis

[1] “How much will excess map loads purchased online cost?”
[2] OSM-talk Maillling-List: “Nice problem to have”
[3] OSM-talk Maillling-List: “Nice problem to have”
[4] OSMstats: Statistics of the free wiki world map (accessed on March 5th, 2012)
[5] OSMstats: Statistics of the free wiki world map (accessed on March 11th, 2012)