Towards an Automated Comparison of OpenStreetMap with Authoritative Road Datasets

OpenStreetMap (OSM) is an extraordinarily large and diverse spatial database of the world. Road networks are amongst the most frequently occurring spatial content within the OSM database. These road network representations are usable in many applications. However the quality of these representations can vary between locations. Comparing OSM road networks with authoritative road datasets for a given area or region is an important task in assessing OSM's fitness for use for applications such as routing and navigation. Comparisons such as these can be technically challenging and no software implementation exists which facilitates such comparisons easily and automatically. In this paper we develop and propose a flexible methodology for comparing the geometry of OSM road network data with other road datasets. Quantitative measures for the completeness and spatial accuracy of OSM are computed including the compatibility of OSM road data with other map databases. Our methodology provides users with significant flexibility in how they can adjust the parameterisation to suit their needs. This software implementation is exclusively built on open source software and a significant degree of automation is provided for these comparisons. This software can subsequently be extended and adapted for comparison between OSM and other external road datasets. This is the pre-peer reviewed version of the following article: “Brovelli M. A., Minghini M., Molinari M. and Mooney P. (2016) Towards an automated comparison of OpenStreetMap with authoritative road datasets. Transactions in GIS, DOI: 10.1111/tgis.12182” , which has been published in final form at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/tgis.12182/full.

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