Areal Delineation of Home Regions from Contribution and Editing Patterns in OpenStreetMap

ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information

Dennis Zielstra¹  Hartwig H. Hochmair¹  Pascal Neis³  Francesco Tonini² 

[1] Geomatics Program, Fort Lauderdale Research and Education Center, University of Florida, 3205 College Avenue, Ft. Lauderdale, FL 33314, USA; E-Mail:;Center for Geospatial Analytics, North Carolina State University, 5125 Jordan Hall, 2800 Faucette Drive, Raleigh, NC 27695, USA; E-Mail:;Geography Department, Geoinformatics Research Group, Geographisches Institut, University of Heidelberg, Berliner Straße 48, Heidelberg 69120, Germany; E-Mail:

关键词: volunteered geographic information (VGI);    OpenStreetMap;    areal delineation;    contribution patterns;    clustering;   

DOI  :  10.3390/ijgi3041211

来源: mdpi

【 摘 要 】

The type of data an individual contributor adds to OpenStreetMap (OSM) varies by region. The local knowledge of a data contributor allows for the collection and editing of detailed features such as small trails, park benches or fire hydrants, as well as adding attribute information that can only be accessed locally. As opposed to this, satellite imagery that is provided as background images in OSM data editors, such as ID, Potlatch or JOSM, facilitates the contribution of less detailed data through on-screen digitizing, oftentimes for areas the contributor is less familiar with. Knowing whether an area is part of a contributor’s home region or not can therefore be a useful predictor of OSM data quality for a geographic region. This research explores the editing history of nodes and ways for 13 highly active OSM members within a two-tiered clustering process to delineate an individual mapper’s home region from remotely mapped areas. The findings are evaluated against those found with a previously introduced method which determines a contributor’s home region solely based on spatial clustering of created nodes. The comparison shows that both methods are able to delineate similar home regions for the 13 contributors with some differences.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© 2014 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.