Gregory Marler had the great idea to implement an “explored” map, based on a concept that some of you might know as “fog of war” from strategy video games. So here you go: I extended my OSM Heat Map with the “Explored Map Style”. It essentially reveals the contribution areas of an OpenStreetMap member in a “fog of war” style. The following figure shows Gregory’s amazing “explored” OSM map.

The Heat & Explored Maps are available for almost all OSM members who contributed at least several changesets here: http://yosmhm.neis-one.org (The new “Explored Map Style” can be selected in the layer panel (upper right corner). Additionally, I added the awesome looking and well known Watercolor and Toner map styles from Stamen design)

Thanks to maɪˈæmɪ Dennis

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.

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.

Joseph Reeves asked me on twitter the other day if “anyone knows the average age of @openstreetmap objects?“. Here we go: Based on the complete OSM data history file from here (June 14th, 2014) and some additional lines of code, I conducted a simple analysis.

Overall 400,000 mappers of the more than 1.7 million registered members contributed to the OSM project. Almost 375,000 contributors created at least one Node, 325,000 one Way and 70,000 one Relation object. In total the contributors collected more than 2.7 billion Nodes, 263 million Ways and 3 million relations. The percentage of newly created OSM objects (Nodes, Ways & Relations) has been more or less at the same level for the past few years (2010 to 2014): with17% to 20%. The following diagram shows the percentage of each created OSM object type.

Additionally, I evaluated the number of objects based on the date of their last modification. Utilizing the object timestamps of the last modification, we see a slightly different result for the last 4 years. 55% of the Nodes, 67% of the Ways and 74% of the Relations in the OSM database do not have a timestamp dated before 2012.

This blog post is a summary of Dennis’ and my State of the Map (SotM) United States presentation. Maybe some of you already know about our publication: “Comparison of Volunteered Geographic Information Data Contributions and Community Development for Selected World Regions”. From the abstract: “Our findings showed significantly different results in data collection efforts and local OSM community sizes. European cities provide quantitatively larger amounts of geodata and number of contributors in OSM …”. “Furthermore, the results showed significant data contributions by members whose main territory of interest lies more than one thousand kilometers from the tested areas.” Especially the last finding is quite interesting when considering “arm-chair-mapping” in OSM.

However, for our SotM US session we repeated some of the conducted analyses for 50 urban areas in the United States to see whether similar patterns could be determined. You can find the session abstract here; additionally the ppt slides and also a video are online. The following animation shows the number of contributor’s evolution in the US from 2007 to 2014.

In my last blog post I showed that OpenStreetMap (OSM) changesets offer a great opportunity to visualize the latest changes to the OSM map or to compute some up to date descriptive statistics of a particular region (Typhoon Haiyan OSM Response Map). Oftentimes OSM contributors use tags, comments or hashtags in their changesets to provide additional information about the features they mapped. For example it is quite common to add a specific hashtag, such as #notlm (Night of the living maps), to the changeset comment to link to a mapping party or another event. To filter or collect changesets with these notations, I developed a new webpage: http://resultmaps.neis-one.org/osm-changesets

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.

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.

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! 🙂

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 🙂