In 2010, I first conducted a study which identified regions (places) in the OpenStreetMap (OSM) project in Germany that still had potential for more detailed mapping. Later, in 2016, this analysis was repeated and extended to the entire world. I have since regularly carried out these studies and published the results. The algorithm and some more details are documented in an earlier blog post of mine.

For the year 2024, I have recalculated this analysis and published the results on my website: “Unmapped Places of OpenStreetMap“. For the study, the OSM Planet File in PBF format from Dec. 7th was used. It can be downloaded here.

https://resultmaps.neis-one.org/unmapped

Currently, there are about 8.6 million elements in the OpenStreetMap project that use the place-key, representing either the center or the outline of a named place. Approximately 1.5 million place nodes are registered as villages, defined as “A village/town with up to 10,000 inhabitants.“. More details about the place-keys can be found in the OSM wiki. Depending on which type of street is used as a filter in my search, there are currently at least 170,000 places (villages) in OSM that are unmapped.

How is the number distributed across continents? Currently, 67% of the unmapped places are in Asia, followed by 30% in Africa. The remaining approx. 3 percent are distributed across the rest of the world. The detailed figures:

• Asia: 113,895 (67%)
• Africa: 51,443 (30%)
• South America: 2,282
• Oceania: 804
• Europe: 637
• North America: 484
• Antarctica: 3

In the past the data from my studies have been used for MapRoulette, HOTOSM, MissingMaps, or similar mapathons or challenges. If anyone is interested in the individual layers of the visualization, they can be downloaded here directly as a JS file (track, minor, major). I would appreciate appropriate attribution if my data is used. Please feel free to leave a comment on my OSM diary page, where I have cross-posted this article.

Back in 2010 & 2011 I conducted several studies to detect underrepresented regions a.k.a. “unmapped” places in OpenStreetMap (OSM). More than five years later, some people asked if I could rerun the analysis. Based on the latest OSM planet dump file and Taginfo, almost 1 million places have been tagged as villages. Furthermore, around 59 million streets have a residential, unclassified or service highway value. My algorithm to find unmapped places, works as follows:

1. Use every place node of the OSM dataset which has a village-tag (place=village).
2. Search in a radius of ca. 700 m for a street with one of the following highway-values: residential, unclassified or service.
3. If no street can be found, mark the place as “unmapped”!

My results for the entire OSM planet can be found under the following webpage.

Overall we have more than 440,000 unmapped places in OSM. As you can see in the picture above, most of the places are around Central Africa, Saudi Arabia or China. However, I hope that this analysis helps to complete some of the missing areas or to revise some incorrect map data. Some remarks about “false=positives” or why your village is marked as unmapped? Some possible reasons: Is the used tag for your place correct? Compare the wiki page for further information. Sometimes “hamlet” could be the correct tag value. Are the nearby highways tagged correctly? (OSM wiki)

Amount of unmapped places for each continent:

• Africa 119,084
• Asia 241,833
• Australia 212
• Europe 44,819
• North America 16,464
• Oceania 837
• South America 15,576

Technical Stuff: The OSM data for the analysis is prepared by a custom OSM PBF reader. The webpage, which shows the results, is based on Leaflet 1.0.0-rc1 and the really fast PruneCluster plugin.

*Update*: You’ll find the date of the latest data update in the header -> “(Date: Apr. 9th, 2018)”

Thanks to maɪˈæmɪ Dennis.

The last unmapped places analysis for OpenStreetMap that I conducted is nearly eight months ago. So I figured it was about time to create a new one. You can read in the last blog post how my algorithm exactly works.

However, at the moment (Nov. 4th. 2011) we have (according to the Geofabrik extract) about 597 000 entries in OSM for places that are located within “Europe“. This means we have an overall increase of about 90 000 places within the past eight months. We can separate them into several types with different values:

• City: 1093 (as of March 11th, 2011 it was 1055 ; +3.6%)
• Town: 16213 (as of March 11th, 2011 it was 16106 ; +0.7%)
• Suburb: 29642 (as of March 11th, 2011 it was 24913 ; +19.0%)
• Village: 301638 (as of March 11th, 2011 it was 278691 ; +8.2%)
• Hamlet: 238717 (as of March 11th, 2011 it was 184326 ; 29.5%)
• Isolated dwelling: 9064 (new in my stats)

The results showed that of the total 301638 village entries for Europe in the database, about 154445 (51%) (in March 2011 it was 55%) have not been detected or mapped yet. Further it is possible that the places are tagged incorrectly (e.g. villages vs. hamlet). Anyway, the following figures show the distribution of the values for each country (in different scales).

It is nice to see, that Austria (-688), Czech Republic (-633), France (-1978), Georgia (-721), Germany (-1192), Italy (-926), Poland (-2364), Spain (-1472) and the United Kingdom (-829) were able to reduce their “unmapped places” in a quite solid way. As usual you can find my results as a GPX-overlay here: http://resultmaps.neis-one.org

(Remarks for http://resultmaps.neis-one.org: Not each and every country is available as an overlay. Some countries such as France or Poland showed longer browser loading times to display the GPX-overlays!)

UPDATE: Download the complete GPX-files of this analysis here.

thx @ maɪˈæmɪ Dennis

My last blog post about “Unmapped Places in Europe” was read by more then 800 people. So I think it’s time to redo the analyses a second time after three months. At the moment (March 11th, 2011) we have (according to the Geofabrik extract) 505091 places in OpenStreetmap Europe. They can be separated into the following place-types:

• city=1055 (as of Dec. 5th, 2010 it was 1045 -> +1%)
• town=16106 (as of Dec. 5th, 2010 it was 16032 -> +0.5%)
• suburb=24913 (as of Dec. 5th, 2010 it was 23563 -> +6%)
• village=278691 (as of Dec. 5th, 2010 it was 271147 -> +3%)
• hamlet=184326 (as of Dec. 5th, 2010 it was 165804 -> +11%)

During my last and also during this analysis I *only* used those places that had a corresponding “village”-value. My tool works so far as followed:

1. Get only places with a village-tag.
2. Search nearby (ca. 600m distance) for a street with one of the following highway-types: residential, service, living_street, cycleway, footway, pedestrian, steps or platform.
3. If no street can be found, mark the place as “unmapped”!

Why did I only use villages? Well for the case of Germany it can be assumed that places with “higher” place-type tags such as “town” or “city” have already been mapped.

What are the “false=positives” and why is your village marked as unmapped? A village should usually have at least one of the roads mentioned above otherwise the place should be mapped as a hamlet. Would you agree with this?

The results showed that of the total 278691 villages, about 152337 (55%) (in Dec. 2010 it was 58%) who are located within “Europe”, have not been detected or mapped yet. The following diagram shows the distribution of the numbers by country.

YAY, Germany!!!

The results can again be displayed as a GPX-overlay on a map which can be found here http://resultmaps.neis-one.org :

(Remarks for http://resultmaps.neis-one.org: Not each and every country is available as an overlay. Some countries such as France, Poland and Ukraine showed longer browser loading times to display the GPX-overlays!)

thx @ Dennis

Recently some new posts on the German OpenStreetMap-Mailing-List regarding the coverage of yet undetected regions in OpenStreetMap have been accumulating, caused by the current clearance of the BING-aerial images.

In one of my former blog posts that I wrote back in August this year, I introduced an analysis that included the search for “places” such as small villages etc. in Germany that probably had not been mapped in OSM at that time (the post in German language can be found here).

However, I repeated this analysis using the database of the routing view. This time I expanded the research area to entire Europe. In total there are 477591 places in Europe covered in OSM (at the moment). They can be separated into the following place-types:

• city=1045
• town=16032
• suburb=23563
• village=271147
• hamlet=165804

During my analysis I *only* used those places that had a corresponding “village-tag”. For the case of Germany it can be assumed that places with “higher” place-type tags such as “town” or “city” have already been mapped. In the special case of the “hamlet”-tag there were too many “false=positives” included, thus they could not be considered during the analysis.

The results showed that of the total 271147 villages, about 156940 villages (58%) who are located within Europe, have not been detected or mapped yet (corresponding to the Geofabrik extract). The following diagram shows the distribution of the numbers by country.

The results can either be displayed as a GPX-overlay on an OSM-map which can be found http://resultmaps.neis-one.org or they can be downloaded as a *.zip file that includes the results for all countries that have been included in the analysis (see at the End!).

Remarks for http://resultmaps.neis-one.org :

1. Not each and every country is available as an overlay.
2. Some countries such as France, Poland and Ukraine showed longer browser loading times to display the GPX-overlays.

There is a possibility that some of the “places” have been mapped by now. Currently there is a lot of work being contributed to OSM with the help of the new BING aerial images!

thx @ VBA Dennis 😉

Download Unmapped Places GPX *.zip file: 20101205_results_unmapped_eu.zip