An Introduction to OpenStreetMap in Geographic Information Science: Experiences, Research, and Applications

Recent years have seen new ways of collecting geographic information via the crowd rather than organizations. OpenStreetMap (OSM) is a prime example of this approach and has brought free access to a wealth of geographic information—for many parts of the world, for the first time. The strong growth in the last few years made more and more people consider it as a potential alternative to commercial or authoritative data. The increasing availability of ever-richer data sets of freely available geographic information led to strong interest of researchers and practitioners in the usability of this data—both its limitations and potential. Both the unconventional way the data is being produced as well as its richness and heterogeneity have led to a range of different research questions on how we can assess, mine, enrich, or just use this data in different domains and for a wide range of applications. While this book cannot present all types of research around OpenStreetMap or even the broader category of User Generated Content (UGC) or Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI), it attempts to provide an overview of the current state of the art by presenting some typical and recent examples of work in GIScience on OSM. This chapter provides an introduction to the scholarly work on OpenStreetMap and its current state and summarizes the contributions to this book.

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