[OSM-talk] How can we measure the completeness of the map statistically

[Freek]

On Thursday 26 June 2008, Edward Johnson wrote:
>     * Another hypothesis is that more complete areas of OSM will have a
> higher level of edit activity. If no-one has ever edited an area then it
> may be unlikely that the map is complete there, obviously however there may
> just be nothing there, so this test could be used in conjunction with the
> Yahoo! Imagery test stated before. If we could produce some sort of heat
> map showing which areas are edited most frequently and monitor it over time
> this could certainly show us some interesting trends.

I have done approximately this some time ago. See my post in an earlier thread 
on completeness measures:
http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/2008-May/026284.html

In the meantime I created the images for the Netherlands weekly and put them 
in an animated GIF file:
http://www.vanwal.nl/osm/density/nl_500_080425-080619.gif

On the Dutch tile server we also added a layer showing recent changes, 
overlayed over aerial imagery, see
http://tile.openstreetmap.nl/~rubke/fietskaart/?zoom=9&lat=52.00&lon=5.07&layers=0B000FFFFFFFFFFTT
(Only zoom level 7-10; the placenames can be turned off in the layer menu.)

Although the amount of recent changes is not a measure for completeness, I 
think it shows nicely what we can do using automated image generation, and 
the method can easily be adapted to show different kinds of statistics.

-- 
Freek