Abstract
Abstract. OpenStreetMap (OSM) is the largest spatial database of the world. One of the most frequently occurring geospatial elements within this database is the road network, whose quality is crucial for applications such as routing and navigation. Several methods have been proposed for the assessment of OSM road network quality, however they are often tightly coupled to the characteristics of the authoritative dataset involved in the comparison. This makes it hard to replicate and extend these methods. This study relies on an automated procedure which was recently developed for comparing OSM with any road network dataset. It is based on three Python modules for the open source GRASS GIS software and provides measures of OSM road network spatial accuracy and completeness. Provided that the user is familiar with the authoritative dataset used, he can adjust the values of the parameters involved thanks to the flexibility of the procedure. The method is applied to assess the quality of the Paris OSM road network dataset through a comparison against the French official dataset provided by the French National Institute of Geographic and Forest Information (IGN). The results show that the Paris OSM road network has both a high completeness and spatial accuracy. It has a greater length than the IGN road network, and is found to be suitable for applications requiring spatial accuracies up to 5-6 m. Also, the results confirm the flexibility of the procedure for supporting users in carrying out their own comparisons between OSM and reference road datasets.
Highlights
Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI), which refers to the provision of geospatial contents by ordinary people (Goodchild, 2007), has become a well-established practice in the GIS and geography domains
This section describes the application of the presented GRASSbased procedure to compare the OSM and authoritative road network datasets for Paris city
The latter was made available by the French IGN in the frame of the European COST Action IC1203 'European Network Exploring Research into Geospatial Information Crowdsourcing: Software and methodologies for harnessing geographic information from the crowd (ENERGIC)' in which the authors are involved
Summary
Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI), which refers to the provision of geospatial contents by ordinary people (Goodchild, 2007), has become a well-established practice in the GIS and geography domains. Started in 2004 OpenStreetMap (OSM, http://www.openstreetmap.org) is today the most popular VGI project. Until now it has attracted about two and half million contributors (http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Stats) and it has produced the largest and most diverse geospatial database of the world. The increasing success of OSM is largely due to the open license of data (http://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright) which allows everyone to copy, distribute, transmit and adapt data provided that credit is made to OSM and its contributors. The first includes studies where OSM datasets are compared to reference datasets produced by authoritative bodies and considered as ground truth. The second group of studies on OSM quality is focused on user activities Examples include the works by Keßler et al (2011) and Keßler and de Groot (2013)
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