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

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

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

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

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:

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)