Analyzing the Contributor Activity of a Volunteered Geographic Information Project - The Case of OpenStreetMap

By Pascal Neis, Alexander Zipf. ISPRS Int. J. Geo Inf., 2012

339 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The OpenStreetMap (OSM) project, founded in 2004, has gathered an exceptional amount of interest in recent years and counts as one of the most impressive sources of Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) on the Internet. In total, more than half a million members had registered for the project by the end of 2011. However, while this number of contributors seems impressive, questions remain about the individual contributions that have been made by the project members. This research article contains several studies regarding the contributions by the community of the project. The results show that only 38% (192,000) of the registered members carried out at least one edit in the OSM database and that only 5% (24,000) of all members actively contributed to the project in a more productive way. The majority of the members are located in Europe (72%) and each member has an activity area whose size may range from one soccer field up to more than 50 km2. In addition to several more analyses conducted for this article, predictions will be made about how this newly acquired knowledge can be used for future research.

Subfields: Geography, Planning and Development, Information Systems, Signal Processing

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3cbc32aee0d7af7a03aa17ffcf19cd728cdd57e1

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Citations in the corpus

A Comprehensive Framework for Intrinsic OpenStreetMap Quality Analysis (2014, methodology): “Concerning the distribution of created or edited features among the mappers, OSM shows an inequality in contributions (Neis and Zipf 2012).”
There's No Such Thing as the Perfect Map: Quantifying Bias in Spatial Crowd-sourcing Datasets (2015, background): “Although crowd-sourcing seeks contributions from potentially anyone, in practice previous work has shown that only a tiny group of contributors (often referred to as ‘power users’) produces most of the content [22, 25, 32, 33, 35, 43].”
The world’s user-generated road map is more than 80% complete (2017, background): “The most frequent contributors to OSM have contributed edits in more than one country, perhaps through tracing aerial imagery, or as a result of a vacation or other trip abroad [38].”