[OSM-talk] OSM needs a measure for completeness

Martin Trautmann traut at gmx.de
Mon Feb 4 07:30:48 GMT 2008


Chris Morley wrote:

> I have started a new thread with a measure for completeness in the title
> because this is an important topic for OSM. But the response to the
> recent posts quoted above, and my raising of it last July, has been only
> luke-warm.

I've added http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Straßenschlüssel to 
the wiki, a German description how to measure completeness:

Completeness may be verified most easily for roads.
Primary/secondary/.. are listed on most maps. The approach here is 
focused more on residential:

1) various sources for lists of roads:

You may take names from city maps, get them from postal area codes, from 
telephone books, from address collections and many other sources.

2) encoding of valuable stuff

There's a German system how an address may be encoded. It's based on the 
abbreviations which are used for car plates, an official key for the 
community, an official list of roads, the house number and the first 
letters of one's name. This official list of roads assigns a five digit 
number. This list does include especially all addresses where someone 
lives. Thus minor tracks or not necessarily included: The finer details 
differ from community to community. Roads outside the residential areas 
are not part of these lists.

This encoding system is called "FEIN" or "EIN". It is recommended by the 
police. The road lists (German: "Straßenschlüssel") are used for other 
tasks as well (statistics, ownership, tax, maintenance, ...).

The German cycling club (ADFC) uses this system for bicycle encoding as 
a matter of theft protection. That's why they offer a web service to 
obtain the personal EIN code for anyone: 
<http://fa-technik.adfc.de/code/ein>

3) opengeodb

On the ADFC site there's a another web interface for the opengeodb data 
maintenance, which holds information about many places in Central Europe 
<http://fa-technik.adfc.de/code/opengeodb.pl>. These combined datas, the 
road lists and the opengeodb info, can be used to match OSM data and 
highway tags. The result is a certain measure of completeness, how many 
percent of those roads have been tagged by now. It does not include any 
other stuff that is worth tagging (where it may be more difficult how to 
measure completeness) and it does lack many tracks or details about the 
quality of the data (lanes, speed limits, total length etc.)

Three larger federal states have been processed by now, see
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Category:Statistics

-> Baden-Württemberg
-> Nordrhein-Westfalen / North Rhine-Westphalia
-> Bayern / Bavaria
    -> Oberbayern
    -> Niederbayern

One result is a number in percent how many of those residential roads 
have been tagged. As another result, a second phase may be applied to 
identify incorrect spellings: see
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Talk:Baden-Württemberg#Korrekturvorschläge 
(suggestions for fixes)

I guess that road lists are available almost everywhere. Does anyone 
else do a match for larger regions, instead of the local area?

- Martin




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