Category Archives: Conferences

Data quality of OSM in Switzerland

Posted on by

I had a presentation at the FOSSGIS conference in Rapperswil about the data quality of OpenStreetMap in Switzerland (recording and presentation in German).

Some of the analysis was already posted to this blog previously (post about street names). But there is also a lot of new stuff in this presentation.

Address density

address density 2013

This map shows house numbers per person, so it shows where we already have lots of house numbers. For more details see the address layer of qa.poole.ch. As a reference value there is the address import of Denmark with a density of 0.4 addresses per person.

Public Transport

history railway lengthrailmap_2013The railway network was completed in 2010 in OSM. Interestingly, the length continued to grow. By now, most of the network is mapped with track accuracy.

 Points of interest

It is quite difficult to get reliable references for points of interest. One source I found is the “BFS Betriebszählung 2005”. It knows 23’077 restaurants and 4’683 hotels in Switzerland. OSM has about 10’000 restaurants and 2’500 hotels.

restaurants historyhotels history

Hiking cycling and skating routes

Hiking routes in OSM: 10’103km
Hiking routes according to wandern.ch 60’000km

Cycling routes in OSM: 7’957km
National routes are complete in OSM: 3’452km (officially on veloland.ch 3’242kmb)
Regional routes 4’581km (not yet complete)

Skating routes in OSM: 678km
National routes 460km (of 625km according to skatingland.ch)

How will we continue?

Will the mapping activity stay the same, and will we have:

  • All street names in 2015?
  • All hotels in 2018?
  • All restaurants in 2020?

Thank you to Sarah Hoffmann and Simon Poole for their contributions to this analysis.

 

SOTM day three: Simon Poole elected to the OSMF board

Posted on by

The topic of the third and last day of SOTM was the community. For example, Peter Miller presented his very numerous speciality maps, or Bob Barr had a heart-warming talk on weather open street mappers are rather pirates or pilots. There was also a presentation on OpenStreetMap addiction and how to diagnose and treat it. I personally enjoyed Kinya Inoue’s presentation very much. He talked about his mapping of historical places in Japan (and how that suddenly brought him in a quite dangerous situation).

During lunch time, there was the annual general meeting of the OSMF, the worldwide OSM organisation. During this meeting, the OSMF board was elected, and we congratulate Simon Poole, the current president of SOSM, to his election as an OSMF board member, together with Henk Hoff and Frederik Ramm.

View from the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building

And now it’s time for me to travel some more around Japan. Tokyo is huge (see picture, view from the metropolitan government building) but there are also other places to visit apart from the capital.

SOTM day two

Posted on by
The swiss delegation on the night cruise

The Swiss delegation on the night cruise

The second day was focused on routing and navigation. A lot of companies are interested in this topic. Some of them requested to include auxiliary information into OSM which would not be about physical objects, e.g. identifying the extent of big junctions or whether a turn should be announced at a bifurcation. Over lunch a group picture has been taken.

The evening was spent with causal talk and drinking: We had delicious Japanese food on a night cruise. We went on the boat in Kachidoki and did a tour around the harbour to the landmark building of a TV station. During the whole cruise many different dishes were served, so we got a broad culinary overview.

SOTM 2012: ODbL planet announced

Posted on by
Tokyo by night

Near studio Alta in Shinjuku

Right now the State of the Map 2012 is taking place in Tokyo. This is an impressive city, and sometimes you feel like you jumped right into the (very crowded) future. The first day of SOTM was mostly about humanitarian and crisis mapping. (There were also some talks in Japanese, though I can’t judge those.) Today, there are more technical talks.

The most important announcement for all mappers was at the opening of the conference from Michael Collinson: The next planet will be ODbL licensed. So the redaction period is finally completed!