spatial nodes » OSM

OSM history in one image

stvn — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 15:45:08 +0000

OSM coverage of Berlin over time

I was asked to design a cover for the thesis of our intern working on crowd quality in OSM. This image is a modification of the nice animations GeoFabrik produce on demand, in this case Berlin. Since it needs to be printed I couldn’t use the animation itself. Time moves within the image from left to right. You see that early in OSM-history there was just one highway and over time the data becomes more complete and hopefully more accurate.

Visualizing OpenStreetMap history – part 2

stvn — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 16:10:12 +0000

Thanks to the hard work of Vincent we now have a database with the average version and average age of nodes per grid cell. Now we can start to get a feeling of the data. I’ve rendered both datasets for Amsterdam on a 10x10m grid. In general the idea is that red is bad and green is good. The younger a node is, the more likely it reflects the current situation in the real world. Also the higher the version number, the more people have been looking at that node and corrected it.

At least that is the theory Martijn tries to work with.

The age in days for OpenStreetMap nodes

You can see a clear pattern emerging here, apparently there are areas which get mapped in a short period of time and never touched again. The white squares just didn’t have any nodes in it, so they contain no data.

The version of OSM nodes

It is more difficult to see patterns here. Whereas with age in days the number gives you an instant grasp of the meaning, the version number is less obvious. We probably need to do a statistical analysis of version numbers in OSM. This way we can attach some (relative) meaning to the average version number.

State of the Map

stvn — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 22:59:54 +0000

My friend and colleague New Folder is organizing the State of the Map conference this year. He asked me to design a banner for the official site. The conference is, apart from the usual OSM gathering, also focusing on businesses/governments and how they can use OSM data in their line of work. So I decided to create a banner which reflects the transistion OSM has been through. It started with a single idea and a few people collecting GPS tracks. Slowly from these tracks roads could be destinguished. Different types of roads where classified and more and more data was included and suddenly you got a map which at some points was more detailed than a ‘commercial’ map.

First draft SoftM'09 banner