OpenStreetMap and Ordnance Survey Meridian 2 comparison – 2008 – 2011

In March 2008, I started comparing OpenStreetMap in England to the Ordnance Survey Meridian 2, as a way to evaluate the completeness of OpenStreetMap coverage. The rational behind the comparison is that Meridian 2 represents a generalised geographic dataset that is widely use in national scale spatial analysis. At the time that the study started, …

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Review of OpenStreetMap books

This post reviews the two books about OpenStreetMap that appeared late in 2010:  OpenStreetMap: Using and Enhancing the Free Map of the World (by F. Ramm, J. Topf & S. Chilton, 386 pages, £25) and OpenStreetMap: Be your own Cartographer (by J. Bennett, 252 pages, £25). The review was written by Thomas Koukoletsos, with some …

How Many Volunteers Does It Take To Map An Area Well? The validity of Linus’ law to Volunteered Geographic Information

The paper "How Many Volunteers Does It Take To Map An Area Well? The validity of Linus' law to Volunteered Geographic Information" has appeared in The Cartographic Journal. The proper citation for the paper is: Haklay, M and Basiouka, S and Antoniou, V and Ather, A (2010) How Many Volunteers Does It Take To Map …

Linus’ Law and OpenStreetMap – evidence from large-scale analysis

One issue that remained open in the studies on the relevance of Linus’ Law for OpenStreetMap was that the previous studies looked at areas with more than 5 contributors, and the link between the number of users and the quality was not conclusive – although the quality was above 70% for this number of contributors …

Geographical Citizen Science

The London Citizen Cyberscience Summit in early September was a stimulating event, which brought together a group of people with an interest in this area. A report from the event, with a very good description of the presentations, including a reflection piece, is available on the ‘Strange Attractor’ blog. During the summit, I discussed the …

Completeness in volunteered geographical information – the evolution of OpenStreetMap coverage (2008-2009)

The Journal of Spatial Information Science (JOSIS) is a new open access journal in GIScience, edited by Matt Duckham, Jörg-Rüdiger Sack, and Michael Worboys. In addition, the journal adopted an open peer review process, so readers are invited to comment on a paper while it goes through the formal peer review process. So this seem …

“How good is VGI? A comparative study of OpenStreetMap and Ordnance Survey datasets” – published

The process of academic publication takes a long time, so only now my paper from 2008 is finally in print. So the paper, which should be cited as: "Haklay, M., 2010, How good is volunteered geographical information? A comparative study of OpenStreetMap and Ordnance Survey datasets" Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 37(4) 682 …

The Tyranny of Place and OpenStreetMap

The slides below are from my presentation in State of the Map 2010 in Girona, Spain. While the conference is about OpenStreetMap, the presentation covers a range of spatially implicint and explicit crowdsourcing projects and also activities that we carried out in Mapping for Change, which all show that unlike other crowdsourcing activities, geography (and …

OpenStreetMap completeness evaluation – March 2010

The opening of Ordnance Survey datasets at the beginning of April 2010 is bound to fundamentally change the way OpenStreetMap (OSM) information is produced in the UK. So just before this major change start to influence OpenStreetMap, it is worth evaluating what has been achieved so far without this data. It is also the time …

Usability of VGI in Haiti earthquake response and the 2nd workshop on usability of geographic information

On the 23rd March 2010, UCL hosted the second workshop on usability of geographic information, organised by Jenny Harding (Ordnance Survey Research), Sarah Sharples (Nottingham), and myself. This workshop was extending the range of topics that we have covered in the first one, on which we have reported during the AGI conference last year. This …