[Talk-GB] Measuring the Quality of Mapping

[Chris Andrew]

Thanks so much Jerry, for your comprehensive response. I'll have a proper
read through, and look at the initiatives you've mentioned.

Many thanks,

Chris


On Tue, 30 Nov 2021, 20:39 SK53, <sk53.osm at gmail.com> wrote:

> There's quite an industry of academics doing this sort of thing (sorry few
> links or I'd be all night):
>
> * Muki Hakaly was one of the first to look at OSM, and he's usually had
> one or more students looking at some aspect of this.
> * Alexander Zipf's group (HeiGIT at Heidelberg do a whole range of work
> with OSM, and provide tools such as OHSome to do statistical queries on OSM
> data.
> * Stefano de Sabbata, Leicester, had an approach
> <https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1353829217305804> for
> assessment which, from what I recall, lent itself to being used at a local
> or personal level.
>
> Other names of academic PIs (Principal Investigators) who do a broad range
> of research on or involving OSM which occur to me are: Stefan Keller
> (Rapperswil), Maurizio Neapolitano (Merano), Peter Mooney (Maynooth) and Marco
> Minghini (EC JRC, Ispra). Papers at various recent State of the Map may
> yield other people/ideas. But beware this often ends up being a discussion
> of the modifiable areal unit problem
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modifiable_areal_unit_problem>.
>
> * Disaster Ninja
> <https://disaster.ninja/live/#id=be0cccbf-434a-4ff1-bb5d-de8a2aee1ab7;position=-1.4542041967563364,52.21596649719362;zoom=6.177361590284047>
> has an "OSM quality index" background layer
>
> Broadly, most studies indicate the following rough proxies for quality:
>
> * Multiple mappers in an area (IIRC about 10 in one of Hakaly studies)
> * Regular contributions and updates
>
> Specific quality measures tend to be mostly done a thematic level, with
> highway completeness being the earliest studied. Usually these require some
> external data source for comparison purposes. We already have tools along
> these lines for Food Hygiene & Solar Power. The most interesting
> possibility is creating quality metrics internally derived from OSM. One
> approach
> <http://sk53-osm.blogspot.com/2018/07/can-we-identify-completeness-of.html>
> I've advocated is looking for saturation in the mapping of a given thematic
> group (note I didn't find much evidence for this with mapping shops). Peter
> Reed had a very detailed thread about how retail was mapped in the UK,
> which ended
> <http://tlatet.blogspot.com/2015/08/osm-retail-survey-conclusions-1.html>
> by deriving a fairly simple metric based on comparing OSM & FHRS data.
>
> Something which I don't think has been particularly touched on w.r.t
> quality metrics is up-to-dateness (particularly relevant because it's
> harder to keep stuff up-to-date than create it). We tend to be pretty good
> at getting big new roads, bridges and railway lines in as they open, but
> are worse at updating new residential developments, and fairly poor at
> keeping data on schools & similar things current.
>
> tldr; there are lots of approaches and some indices are already available.
>
> Jerry
>
> On Tue, 30 Nov 2021 at 19:29, Chris Andrew <cjhandrew at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Hi, all.
>>
>> This is probably a really stupid idea.
>>
>> Thinking about the quality of OSM mapping, is it currently possible to
>> assess the mapping in a given area, and rate it with a score, based on
>> quality criteria? Just thinking that in the spirit of 'continuous
>> improvement' and the Deming Cycle (Plan > Do > Check > Act (repeat...)), we
>> could use this method to identify areas that need improving, and use this
>> to organise future efforts.
>>
>> I guess we could use stats that may already be available, eg missing/
>> incorrect tags, where available, x-ref OSM data with other permissive data
>> sources and identify potentially missing information. I know that
>> Robert Whittaker has done some great work that is relevant to this
>> question, but having some sort of published 'league table' of good/ bad
>> areas, that can be understood by most people, would surely be a good thing.
>>
>> I know this is a vague idea, but as they (correctly?) say, if we can't
>> measure it, we can't improve it.
>>
>> Am I barking up the wrong tree?
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>> Chris
>> chris_debian
>>
>>
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>
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