Abstract
OpenStreetMap (OSM) has proven to serve as a promising free global encyclopedia of maps with an increasing popularity across different user communities and research bodies. One of the unique characteristics of OSM has been the availability of the full history of users’ contributions, which can leverage our quality control mechanisms through exploiting the history of contributions. Since this aspect of contributions (i.e., historical contributions) has been neglected in the literature, this study aims at presenting a novel approach for improving the positional accuracy and completeness of the OSM road network. To do so, we present a five-stage approach based on a Voronoi diagram that leads to improving the positional accuracy and completeness of the OSM road network. In the first stage, the OSM data history file is retrieved and in the second stage, the corresponding data elements for each object in the historical versions are identified. In the third stage, data cleaning on the historical datasets is carried out in order to identify outliers and remove them accordingly. In the fourth stage, through applying the Voronoi diagram method, one representative version for each set of historical versions is extracted. In the final stage, through examining the spatial relations for each object in the history file, the topology of the target object is enhanced. As per validation, a comparison between the latest version of the OSM data and the result of our approach against a reference dataset is carried out. Given a case study in Tehran, our findings reveal that the completeness and positional precision of OSM features can be improved up to 14%. Our conclusions draw attention to the exploitation of the historical archive of the contributions in OSM as an intrinsic quality indicator.
Highlights
The widespread availability of advanced web technologies, the improvement of mapping devices and positioning systems, as well as the escalating growth of users’ need of spatial information have led to an emerging era of massive citizen-collected geographic data
OSM has turned into one of the largest and most successful examples of volunteered geographic information (VGI) projects by creating and maintaining a free online map that could be revised by the users while having global coverage [3]
It is of note that all the OSM data, such as the ways, nodes, and relations, besides its previous versions, are kept in the OSM data history, which itself entails all the spatial and semantic information of a certain object along with information related to the users of that object [5]
Summary
The widespread availability of advanced web technologies, the improvement of mapping devices and positioning systems, as well as the escalating growth of users’ need of spatial information have led to an emerging era of massive citizen-collected geographic data. Brovelli et al [19] presented an approach for evaluating two data quality elements, namely, completeness and positional accuracy, based on the difference with the reference data, which was capable of setting the parameters of quality assessment consistent with the users’ needs These studies have been conducted across different countries with diverse contribution patterns, e.g., Germany [13,14,16,20], Iran [15,17], England [12], France [11], and Greece [10,18]. Arsanjani et al [21] investigated several quality-related elements, including positional accuracy, completeness, and semantic accuracy, linked with contributing users who produced the data In this category, the researchers endeavored to explore the impact of the number of contributors on the data quality [22,23,24].
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