The world’s user-generated road map is more than 80% complete
By Christopher P. Barrington-Leigh, A. Millard‐Ball. PLoS ONE, 2017
420 citations recorded by the source corpus.
OpenStreetMap, a crowdsourced geographic database, provides the only global-level, openly licensed source of geospatial road data, and the only national-level source in many countries. However, researchers, policy makers, and citizens who want to make use of OpenStreetMap (OSM) have little information about whether it can be relied upon in a particular geographic setting. In this paper, we use two complementary, independent methods to assess the completeness of OSM road data in each country in the world. First, we undertake a visual assessment of OSM data against satellite imagery, which provides the input for estimates based on a multilevel regression and poststratification model. Second, we fit sigmoid curves to the cumulative length of contributions, and use them to estimate the saturation level for each country. Both techniques may have more general use for assessing the development and saturation of crowd-sourced data. Our results show that in many places, researchers and policymakers can rely on the completeness of OSM, or will soon be able to do so. We find (i) that globally, OSM is ∼83% complete, and more than 40% of countries—including several in the developing world—have a fully mapped street network; (ii) that well-governed countries with good Internet access tend to be more complete, and that completeness has a U-shaped relationship with population density—both sparsely populated areas and dense cities are the best mapped; and (iii) that existing global datasets used by the World Bank undercount roads by more than 30%.
Subfields: Geography, Planning and Development, Ocean Engineering, Transportation
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f276a051441930e3c59cfc8fe67c38df02a86aea
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Citations in the corpus
- High-resolution large-scale onshore wind energy assessments: A review of potential definitions, methodologies and future research needs (2021, neutral): “[78] assessed OSM’s completeness of roads on average globally, concluding that roughly 80% of all roads are accurately represented in the database, a coverage which”
- Urban spatial order: street network orientation, configuration, and entropy (2018, methodology): “On the left, Manhattan’s 29° angled grid originates from the New York Commissioners’ Plan of 1811, which laid out its iconic 800-foot × 200-foot blocks (Ballon, 2012; Koeppel, 2015).”
- Street view imagery in urban analytics and GIS: A review (2021, background): “Wang, Kang, and Zhu (2018) Likely because road data is nowadays complete and easily obtainable (Barrington-Leigh & Millard-Ball, 2017), mapping roads is seldom conducted, but they have been subject of classification and semantic enrichment.”