Corporate Editors in the Evolving Landscape of OpenStreetMap: A Close Investigation of the Impact to the Map & Community (original) (raw)
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Corporate Editors in the Evolving Landscape of OpenStreetMap
ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information, 2019
OpenStreetMap (OSM), the largest Volunteered Geographic Information project in the world, is characterized both by its map as well as the active community of the millions of mappers who produce it. The discourse about participation in the OSM community largely focuses on the motivations for why members contribute map data and the resulting data quality. Recently, large corporations including Apple, Microsoft, and Facebook have been hiring editors to contribute to the OSM database. In this article, we explore the influence these corporate editors are having on the map by first considering the history of corporate involvement in the community and then analyzing historical quarterly-snapshot OSM-QA-Tiles to show where and what these corporate editors are mapping. Cumulatively, millions of corporate edits have a global footprint, but corporations vary in geographic reach, edit types, and quantity. While corporations currently have a major impact on road networks, non-corporate mappers e...
An automated approach to identifying corporate editing activity in OpenStreetMap
2021
Veselovsky, V., Sarkar, D., Anderson, J. & Soden, R. (2021). An automated approach to identifying corporate editing activity in OSM In: Minghini, M., Ludwig, C., Anderson, J., Mooney, P., Grinberger, A.Y. (Eds.). Proceedings of the Academic Track at the State of the Map 2021 Online Conference, July 09-11 2021, 31-33. Available at https://zenodo.org/communities/sotm-2021
OpenStreetMap (OSM) represents one of the most well-known examples of a collaborative mapping project. Major research efforts have so far dealt with data quality analysis but the modality of OSM's evolution across space and time has barely been noted. This study aims to analyze spatio-temporal patterns of contributions in OSM by proposing a contribution index (CI) in order to investigate the dynamism of OSM. The CI is based on a per cell analysis of the node quantity, interactivity, semantics, and attractivity (the ability to attract contributors). Additionally this research explores whether OSM has been constantly attracting new users and contributions or if OSM has experienced a decline in its ability to attract continued contributions. Using the Stuttgart region of Germany as a case study the empirical findings of the CI over time confirm that since 2007, OSM has been constantly attracting new users, who create new features, edit the existing spatial objects, and enrich them with attributes. This rate has been dramatically growing since 2011. The utilization of a Cellular Automata-Markov (CA-Markov) model provides evidence that by the end of 2016 and 2020, the rise of CI will spread out over the study area and only a few cells without OSM features will remain.
ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information, 2022
This paper is an Editorial for the Special Issue titled “OpenStreetMap as a multidisciplinary nexus: perspectives, practices and procedures”. The Special Issue is largely based on the talks presented in the 2019 and 2020 editions of the Academic Track at the State of the Map conferences. As such, it represents the most pressing and relevant issues and topics considered by the academic community in relation to OpenStreetMap (OSM)—a global project and community aimed to create and maintain a free and editable database and map of the world. In this Editorial, we survey the papers included in the Special Issue, grouping them into three research perspectives: applications of OSM for studies within other disciplines, OSM data quality, and dynamics in OSM. This survey reveals that these perspectives, while being distinct, are also interrelated. This calls for the formalization of an ‘OSM science’ that will provide the conceptual grounds to advance the scientific study of OSM, not as a set of individualized efforts but as a unified approach.
Tracking editing processes in volunteered geographic information: The case of OpenStreetMap
2011
Abstract. With an increasing number of applications building on Open-StreetMap, data quality is becoming a pressing issue. Data provenance gives useful hints that facilitate data quality assessments based on the features' persistence. However, this requires a detailed analysis of the editing history and the corresponding contributors. In order to make this provenance information explicit, we introduce a provenance vocabulary for OpenStreetMap and show how to annotate OpenStreetMap data using this vocabulary.
OpenStreetMap as a multi-faceted research subject: the Academic Track at State of the Map 2021
2021
Grinberger, A.Y., Anderson, J., Mooney, P., Ludwig, C. & Minghini, M. (2021). OpenStreetMap as a multi-faceted research subject: the academic track at State of the Map 2021 In: Minghini, M., Ludwig, C., Anderson, J., Mooney, P., Grinberger, A.Y. (Eds.). Proceedings of the Academic Track at the State of the Map 2021 Online Conference, July 09-11 2021, 1-5. Available at https://zenodo.org/communities/sotm-2021
Assessing the Quality of OpenStreetMap Contributors together with their Contributions.pdf
Recently, geography has faced a new era in collecting spatial objects, numeric, and descriptive information on geographic objects, which has led it into a new concept socalled Neogeography . This is the consequence of advancement of mobile technologies and broadband communication, among others, in the frame of Web 2.0. This has been caused due to a continuous influx of geoinformation from the Internet, mainly gathered through collaborative mapping projects. One of the most well-known and popular examples of it is the OpenStreetMap (OSM) project, which aims at providing a free editable map and the underlying data of the world dedicated by its inhabitants.
ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information, 2022
The academic community frequently engages with OpenStreetMap (OSM) as a data source and research subject, acknowledging its complex and contextual nature. However, existing literature rarely considers the position of academic research in relation to the OSM community. In this paper we explore the extent and nature of engagement between the academic research community and the larger communities in OSM. An analysis of OSM-related publications from 2016 to 2019 and seven interviews conducted with members of one research group engaged in OSM-related research are described. The literature analysis seeks to uncover general engagement patterns while the interviews are used to identify possible causal structures explaining how these patterns may emerge within the context of a specific research group. Results indicate that academic papers generally show few signs of engagement and adopt data-oriented perspectives on the OSM project and product. The interviews expose that more complex perspectives and deeper engagement exist within the research group to which the interviewees belong, e.g., engaging in OSM mapping and direct interactions based on specific points-of-contact in the OSM community. Several conclusions and recommendations emerge, most notably: that every engagement with OSM includes an interpretive act which must be acknowledged and that the academic community should act to triangulate its interpretation of the data and OSM community by diversifying their engagement. This could be achieved through channels such as more direct interactions and inviting members of the OSM community to participate in the design and evaluation of research projects and programmes.
Proceedings of the Academic Track at the State of the Map 2020
2020
OpenStreetMap (OSM), the largest crowdsourced geographic database has garnered interest from corporations over the last four years. Today, major corporations including Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft have dedicated teams contributing to OSM. More than 2,300 OSM editors are associated with corporate data teams, up from approximately 1,000 in 2019 [1]. As of March 2020, nearly 17% of the global road network (measured per kilometer) was most recently edited by a corporate data-team member. Each corporation edits according to their own agenda; displaying unique patterns of edits with respect to types of features edited, mode (manual, import, or machine assisted), locations, and volume of edits. We investigate the unique editing patterns associated with three corporations: Grab, Digital Egypt, and Tesla, the latter two's editing activity has never previously been quantified. Differing from corporations with high volumes of global editing [1], these corporations operate in specific geographies and exhibit uniquely specific patterns. We use a combination of OSM data processing pipelines including tile-reduce, osm-qa-tiles, and osm-interaction tilesets [2] to extract and quantify the edits associated with the corporations. Grab is a Singapore-based company active in SouthEast Asia offering ride-hailing transport, food delivery, and payment services. Grab is actively editing OSM data since 2018 and has thus far edited 1.6M features. Grab's focus on transport related services implies that a navigable road network is a priority. However, topology and navigation restrictions are difficult to encode. Grab dedicates efforts to improve road navigability. In Singapore, Grab has edited over 100,000 turn restrictions, comprising 95% of all turn restrictions in Singapore (and 7% of all turn restrictions globally). This represents a highly focused effort put in by a corporation in a specific place to build infrastructure needed to support their business. Overall, Grab's efforts of improving data and building a community of editors in SouthEast Asia is beneficial for the OSM ecosystem. Digital Egypt (DE) aims to produce detailed GIS and Mapping data in Egypt, Middle East and Africa. Active in a part of the world with sparse geographic data coverage, Digital Egypt's team of 24 mappers is working to improve the accuracy of OSM for geocoding. As of March 2020, DE has edited more than 2M features in Egypt, more than 1.7M of these edits involve objects with address tags (e.g. addr:housenumber
A Qualitative Enquiry into OpenStreetMap Making
Based on a case study on the OpenStreetMap community, this paper provides a contextual and embodied understanding of the user-led, user-participatory and user-generated produsage phenomenon. It employs Grounded Theory, Social Worlds Theory, and qualitative methods to illuminate and explores the produsage processes of OpenStreetMap making, and how knowledge artefacts such as maps can be collectively and collaboratively produced by a community of people, who are situated in different places around the world but engaged with the same repertoire of mapping practices. The empirical data illustrate that OpenStreetMap itself acts as a boundary object that enables actors from different social worlds to co-produce the Map through interacting with each other and negotiating the meanings of mapping, the mapping data and the Map itself. The discourses also show that unlike traditional maps that black-box cartographic knowledge and offer a single dominant perspective of cities or places, OpenStreetMap is an embodied epistemic object that embraces different world views. The paper also explores how contributors build their identities as an OpenStreetMaper alongside some other identities they have. Understanding the identity-building process helps to understand mapping as an embodied activity with emotional, cognitive and social repertoires.