Nach knapp 1.000 Tagen Abstinenz (endlich?) mal wieder ein Blog Post von mir. Aufgrund des inhaltlichen und räumlichen Bezugs diesmal auf deutsch. English version via Google translate?

Präambel – Im Herbst 2020 entstand beim FOSSGIS e.V. eine Open Data Arbeitsgruppe. Durch verschiedene gemeinsame Aktivitäten von der Arbeitsgruppe und dem Bundesamt für Kartographie und Geodäsie (BKG), wie z.B. einem Workshop, wurden Anfang Dezember 2020 zwei Datensätze von Standorten der Landespolizei und Gesundheitsämtern für die „Pflege und Erweiterung der OpenStreetMap-Datenbank“ freigegeben. Daneben existieren beim BKG noch weitere interessante „Open Data“ Geodaten und Webdienste, die aber aufgrund ihrer Lizenzbedingungen nicht vom OpenStreetMap (OSM) Projekt verwendet werden dürfen.

Ein „offizieller offener“ Datensatz von einer Bundesbehörde? Gut, wie sieht’s im Vergleich zu gemeinsam zusammengetragen Daten aus, z.B. OpenStreetMap? Lassen sich Unterschiede in der Qualität feststellen? Sind die Datensätze womöglich auf Augenhöhe oder existieren gravierende Unterschiede oder wovon könnten alle profitieren?

While I was working on my latest blog post, I realized that I had already written 100 posts over the past nine years. All posts have one thing in common: They are about the well-known and maybe never ending OpenStreetMap project. From time to time there are still emerging questions or issues which must be tackled by someone. This always fascinated me about OSM. However, this particular number 100 is not about a specific subject, it’s just a tiny post to say thank you! Thank you for your continuous interest in reading, commenting and of course sometimes criticizing my work. To me it’s still awesome to see that you, a few thousand people in total, use tools or services daily, that I implemented.

Last year I wrote two blog posts about the OpenStreetMap (OSM) feature that allows commenting on contributor map changes within a changeset. The first blog post showed some general descriptive statistics about the number of created changeset discussions, affected countries, the origin of the commenting contributors or their mapping reputation. The second post described a newly introduced feature, where contributors can flag their changeset so that their map edits can be reviewed. This blog post will follow up on this topic and conducts some similar but updated research.

The first chart shows the number of created comments (discussed changesets) and the contributors involved over the last 15 months. The number of created comments and discussed changesets fluctuates over time, whereas the number of contributors who take part in changeset discussions stays consistent at around 1,500 per month. Around 3,200 contributors received a comment on at least one changeset’s map edits a month.

OSMstats contains several statistics about the OpenStreetMap (OSM) project, such as daily-created objects, the amount of active contributors or detailed numbers for individual countries. One way to determine the sum of created or modified Node objects, is to use the minutely, hourly or daily OSM replication change files and counting the values for each country of the world. Sadly, this approach has some drawbacks. Firstly, the official files do not contain, for example, all Nodes of a modified way, which is required, when trying to find the country where the change took place. Furthermore, the determination of the country for a specific OSM object really depends on the border’s level of detail: More detailed country borders make the processing quite time-consuming. Some of you probably experienced this problem before when using Osmosis or a different OSM processing tool. Anyway, for calculating additional country statistics I tried a new approach:

1. Determine the country of a changset based on its center position
2. Use the changeset country information for all objects within this changeset.

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! 🙂