Back in June we had a twitter chat about potential new features for the “How did you contribute to OpenStreetMap” (HDYC) website. One suggestion was to “show more relevant information about skills, tagging system or the quality of contributions” of a project member (by J-Louis). Overall I really like the following summary by Claudius: “HDYC started off with a strong focus on quantitative metrics and you expanded it lately a lot to reflect the qualitative nature of contributions. I think there’s value to show more about which area of data someone contributed: Auto/bike/railway/water infrastructure, amenities…”.

So I finally started searching in the OpenStreetMap (OSM) wiki for any feasible information about “groups of tags” or “tag categories”. Altogether, I couldn’t discover any solution that fits perfectly to determine the areas of data a mapper contributed in. However, later I got a hint from the JOSM developers to use the presets of the well-known and popular editor. You may ask, ‘What are presets?’ “Presets in JOSM are menu-driven shortcuts to tag common object types in OpenStreetMap. They provide you with a user friendly interface to edit one or more objects at a time, suggest additional keys and values you may wish to add to those objects, and most importantly, prevent you from having to enter keys and values by hand.” You can find many different presets at the aforementioned JOSM page. However, during my data processing I utilized the “default presets”. The XML file contains many combinations of popular or established tag combinations, which contributors use when they are mapping.

So far so good, as a first step I released a new version of “Find Suspicious OpenStreetMap Changesets“. It shows the utilized presets for each changeset. This can already indicate some quality aspects such as attribute (tag) accuracy or completeness. Now, after some weeks and some minor adjustments, I started to use this collected information about applied presets to expand the metrics of a mapper’s profile. The HDYC-page now also lists which presets the mapper recently utilized during her/his contributions such as adding, modifying or removing map elements. I think this is a really useful next step towards an even more required aspect of quality assurance that we highly need with the OSM project.

Some technical details: The database behind the “Find Suspicious OpenStreetMap Changesets” webpage uses the augmented diff files of the Overpass-API. The utilized “default” preset list of the JOSM editor can be found here (Internal Preset list). The entire processing tool was developed with JAVA and uses a Postgres database to store the results. By now, only recently utilized presets of the past 60 days of the contributor’s activity are utilized and presented.

However, thank you very much for all your feedback. Hope that it helps.

Thanks to maɪˈæmɪ Dennis.

Almost two years ago I published a web service that finds suspicious OpenStreetMap (OSM) map changes. You can use the service here and find some more information in previous blog posts. Especially Changeset discussions revealed that they are more or less de facto standard for communication between contributors during map change reviews.

However, when I am inspecting map changes, I sometimes see new contributors using uncommon OSM tags. Therefore I think it could be useful to add an additional assessment parameter to the aforementioned suspicious OSM map changes page. The newly introduced indicator states the matching ratio between the contributed and the most popular OSM tags. This means, if the changeset contributor used many uncommon tags at her/his map changes objects, the matching rate will be low. If the contributor applied many common (“popular”) tags, it results in a high matching rate towards 100%. For the calculation I used Jochen Topf’s taginfo API to get commonly used OSM tags. An API description can be found here. Furthermore I added the average age (in days) of modified and deleted objects. This indicator can be used to see if the contributor edited objects, which have been mapped today (0 days) or exist already for a longer period of time, e.g. 1566 days. The values for the average version numbers are computed in a similar fashion.

Last but not least, the number of the affected contributors of the changeset is calculated. If a contributor only changes objects on which she or he is the latest modifier, this number will be ‘0’. Otherwise the value represents the number of unique mappers whose contributions have been changed. I hope that overall the newly added indicators can be useful for identifying changesets which need a closer look. The suspicious OSM map changes website has also received some style updates. They should help to highlight the most important parameters. I also added the aggregation of the latest changesets for a specific contributor. Guess this could be really useful to see a “big picture” of the individual mapping activities.

The aforementioned service is online here –> “Find Suspicious OpenStreetMap Changesets”

Thanks to maɪˈæmɪ Dennis.

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.

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 reputation of a contributor in OpenStreetMap (OSM) plays a significant role, especially when considering the quality assessment of the collected data. Sometimes it’s difficult to make a meaningful statement about a contributor by simply looking at the raw mapping work represented by the number of created objects or used tags. Therefore, it would be really helpful if we would have some additional information about the person who contributes to the project. For example: Does she/he help other contributors? Is her/his work somehow documented or based on one of the “discussed” proposals? Or does she/he work as a lone warrior in the OSM world?

In 2010 I created “How did you contribute to OpenStreetMap?” (HDYC) as a kind of fun side project. Nowadays many people use it to get some detailed information about OSM contributors. Some of you are probably familiar with the “verified” icon used on some celebrity Twitter accounts. I created a similar new feature for the aforementioned HDYC page. If you connect your related OSM accounts, your profile will be marked as “verified”.

What do you have to do to get a verified contributor profile, you ask? First of all, you have to create at least 100 OSM changesets. Secondly, you need a login (username) for the OSM Help Forum, for the common OSM Forum and for the OSM Wiki. Last but not least, you have to list your OSM related accounts on your OSM profile page. After that, you should be able to see your accounts in your HDYC profile and your account will be automatically marked as verified.

Malenki already mentioned his usernames as an example in his profile. He also described it in a tiny OSM diary. Overall this feature is optional. So if you don’t want to “connect” or show your accounts for privacy protection, please don’t mention them on your OSM profile. My script checks the OSM profiles of the latest active OSM contributors every 24h. That’s it.

The HDYC profile now also shows the number of your changeset discussions and, if mentioned in your OSM profile, the page shows your Mapillary account as well.

Notice: If someone is trying to cheat with other people’s accounts, I will blacklist her/his username.

Thanks to maɪˈæmɪ Dennis.

Since its rise in popularity, the well-known online encyclopedia Wikipedia has been struggling with manipulation or, in the worst-case, vandalism attempts. Similarly, the OpenStreetMap (OSM) project suffered several times over the past few years of cases where incorrect map data edits were made. These erroneous edits can stem at times from (new) contributors or illegal data imports (or automated edits) which have not been discussed in advance with the community or the Data Working Group (DWG) and corrupted existing project data. The current OSM wiki page gives a great overview about general guidelines and e.g. types of vandalism. Another page in the wiki also mentions a prototype of a rule based system for the automatic detection of vandalism in OSM, which I developed in 2012. However, the system has never actually been implemented. Today, the contributors of OSM can use a variety of different tools to inspect an area or particular map changes. A few of them are listed below (complete list can be found here):

• WhoDidIt
• ITO world OSM Mapper
• Last Week on OSM
• achavi – Augmented OSM Change Viewer

Based on the database which I use for multiple other services, I created an easy to use webpage to find suspicious OSM changesets with possibly incorrect map edits. The webpage offers some filter options such as the boundary of a country or the object change of interest. In contrast to the other aforementioned webpages you can also filter changesets based on the active “mapping days” of the contributor. A “mapping day” is a day on which the contributor created at least one changeset, independent from the registration date. I am also planning on adding additional user reputation information such as used editors or tagging behavior. And of course I am going to add some RSS feeds in the next version. The first version can be found here.

What makes all of this different from other tools? Well, I think one of the major advantages is the simplicity of the webpage and that you can filter changesets based on the contributor activity and/or the changeset edits. In contrast to other tools, you can find changesets not only based on your area of interest, but also based on potential beginner mistakes and hopefully not vandalism attempts or fictional/ none existing map data.

Find Suspicious OSM Changesets here: http://resultmaps.neis-one.org/osm-suspicious

Thanks to maɪˈæmɪ Dennis.

The Missing Maps project is a collaboration between the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) and various partner agencies, such as the American or the British Red Cross. One of their main objectives is “to map the most vulnerable places in the developing world, in order that international and local NGOs and individuals can use the maps and data to better respond to crises affecting the areas.” You can find additional information about the Missing Maps Project on the OpenStreetMap (OSM) wiki and their project page.

A year ago, I created a webpage where you can filter OSM changesets by a specific comment. Sadly the webpage provides only a search for the latest seven days. However, the Missing Maps project asked me, if it’s possible to “look over a longer time scale”? Here we go, based on a similar concept that I used for a webpage that I created for the HOT Ebola Response, I made a Map that displays all OSM changesets which have the hashtag #MissingMaps in the comment attribute and have been created since August 1st, 2014. It’s online here and being updated on an hourly basis: http://resultmaps.neis-one.org/osm-missingmaps

The webpage also contains overall information about the number of OSM Contributors and map changes. So far more than 800 contributors created more than 1.5 Mio map changes in almost 22,000 changesets. The volunteers contributed in more than 30 countries such as Congo-Kinshasa, Sudan, Central African Republic, Indonesia, Ethiopia, Chad, Zimbabwe or Rwanda. Additionally the number of created changesets and contributors of the last seven days are displayed in two charts at the left-hand side. The time slider at the bottom of the map can be used to show the changesets between two specific dates. Finally an overview page lists the names of all OSM contributors who used the hashtag #MissingMaps in their changesets comment. Same as last time: Thank you & keep up the good work!

Thanks to maɪˈæmɪ Dennis.

For almost eight months the OpenStreetMap (OSM) community has been collecting geo information for the West Africa Ebola outbreak response now. The collective work of the crowd is somewhat managed by the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT). For example, the Task Manager provided by HOT gives interested contributors information in which areas map features are needed. However, you can find additional information in an article by Pierre Beland, which he wrote during a conference where he presented the efforts of the OSM community. The OSM wiki contains some useful information about the West Africa Ebola Response too. Matt Irwin also wrote a summary about the OSM mapper contributions and created an interesting visualization of all the mapping work.

I created a response map for the OSM mapping activities in West Africa, a similar approach as I previously used for the “Typhoon Haiyan” deployment. It displays all OSM changesets created since March 1st, 2014. The analysis extent is displayed by a black rectangle. In total, more than 2,000 contributors made more than 10 million changes to the map. At the bottom you will find a time range slider which can control the displayed changesets. Sorry for the sometimes slow performance, but the community (maybe you too) collected a huge amount of data! The map is online here: http://resultmaps.neis-one.org/osm-ebola

A complete list of all OSM contributor names with their number of map changes can be found here. It’s really fantastic, “Thank you & keep up the good work!”. This time I have also spent some time to analyze what type of contributors helped in this scenario. The following diagram shows the number of contributors per month in the above mentioned analysis extend. Additionally, it contains information on how long the individual contributors have been collecting map data. In contrast to the first months, many new members contributed data in the past three months.

Based on the information from “How did you contribute to OSM“, which shows in what country a member performed the most map changes, I created the following chart. It displays the distribution of the contributor’s countries of origin. I assume that the high number of new registered members, who created many changesets during their Ebola response, moved their origin towards West Africa. However, overall more than 2,000 contributors from almost 110 countries helped so far, AWESOME! What do you think?

Lastly, I would like to point to the following blog post which shows you how to search for changesets with a specific comment for any region of the world: “Filtering OpenStreetMap Changesets by a Specific Comment“.

Thanks to maɪˈæmɪ Dennis.

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.

Thanks to maɪˈæmɪ Dennis