Abstract
Abstract. Digital transformation is at core of Europe’s future and the importance of data is well highlighted by the recently published European strategy for data, which envisions the establishment of so-called European data spaces enabling seamless data flows across actors and sectors to ultimately boost the economy and generate innovation. Integrating datasets produced by multiple actors, including citizen-generated data, is a key objective of the strategy. This study focuses on OpenStreetMap (OSM), the most popular crowdsourced geographic information project, and is the first step towards an exploration of pros and cons of integrating its open-licensed data with authoritative geospatial datasets from European National Mapping Agencies. In contrast to previous work, which has only tested data integration at the local or regional level, an experiment was presented to integrate the national address dataset published by the National Land Survey (NLS) of Finland with the corresponding dataset from OSM. The process included the analysis of the two datasets, a mapping between their data models and a set of processing steps – performed using the open source QGIS software – to transform and finally combine their content. The resulting dataset confirms that, while addresses from the NLS are in general more complete across Finland, in some areas OSM addresses provide a higher detail and more up-to-date information to usefully complement the authoritative one. Whilst the analysis confirms that an integration between OSM and authoritative geospatial datasets is technically and semantically feasible, future work is needed to evaluate enablers and barriers that also exist at the legal and organisational level.
Highlights
The digital transformation of the economy and society is at the very core of the European Commission’s priorities for the period 2019-2024, centred around the twin need for a greener and more digital Europe (European Commission, 2019). This is proven by the Recovery and Resilience Facility, recently established in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, which prescribes that at least 20% of the C672.5 billion provided to European Union Member States in loans and grants have to be used for the digital transformation (European Commission, 2021)
Given that the data model for address data is richer in INSPIRE than in OSM, we considered that the best approach for the integration of the two was to transform the INSPIRE-compliant National Land Survey (NLS) dataset against the OSM data model
This was a fully arbitrary choice; the opposite one, i.e. the transformation of the OSM dataset against the NLS/INSPIRE data model would be possible as well
Summary
The digital transformation of the economy and society is at the very core of the European Commission’s priorities for the period 2019-2024, centred around the twin need for a greener and more digital Europe (European Commission, 2019). The vision is to establish a common European data space based on domain-specific data spaces in strategic sectors such as environment, agriculture, industry, health and transportation To achieve this goal, an ambitious set of legislative instruments to be released by 2024 will address a number of data-related issues such as availability, interoperability, quality, governance, cybersecurity, skills and literacy as well as the overarching data infrastructures. The European strategy for data acknowledges the importance of all kinds of data, being them produced by the public sector, the private sector, academia or citizens Making it possible to combine and integrate data from different sources—by solving all the issues mentioned above—acquires primary importance for the successful establishment of data spaces. Instead of comparing OSM with authoritative datasets, other studies such as Barron et al (2014), Minghini and Frassinelli (2019) and Madubedube et al (2021) assessed OSM quality through intrinsic approaches, i.e. by only looking at the history of the OSM data itself (e.g. the frequency of update or the total number and nature of contributors editing the same objects)
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callMore From: The International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences
Disclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
