CHAPTER 3 A Review of OpenStreetMap Data Peter Mooney* and Marco Minghini† *Department of Computer Science, Maynooth University, Maynooth, Co. Kildare, Ireland,
[email protected] †Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Politecnico di Milano, Piazza Leonardo da Vinci 32, 20133 Milano, Italy Abstract While there is now a considerable variety of sources of Volunteered Geo- graphic Information (VGI) available, discussion of this domain is often exem- plified by and focused around OpenStreetMap (OSM). In a little over a decade OSM has become the leading example of VGI on the Internet. OSM is not just a crowdsourced spatial database of VGI; rather, it has grown to become a vast ecosystem of data, software systems and applications, tools, and Web-based information stores such as wikis. An increasing number of developers, indus- try actors, researchers and other end users are making use of OSM in their applications. OSM has been shown to compare favourably with other sources of spatial data in terms of data quality. In addition to this, a very large OSM community updates data within OSM on a regular basis. This chapter provides an introduction to and review of OSM and the ecosystem which has grown to support the mission of creating a free, editable map of the whole world. The chapter is especially meant for readers who have no or little knowledge about the range, maturity and complexity of the tools, services, applications and organisations working with OSM data. We provide examples of tools and services to access, edit, visualise and make quality assessments of OSM data. We also provide a number of examples of applications, such as some of those How to cite this book chapter: Mooney, P and Minghini, M.