Presentation from the Horizon Infrastructure Challenge Theme Day , 19th March 2010. Covering background to OSM, brief analysis of business aspects and focus on motivation This presentation contains material from Nama Raj Budhathoki research on the motivation of OSM contributors

1. OpenStreetMap – Overview and Motivational
Factors
Dr Muki Haklay
Department of Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering, UCL
m.haklay@ucl.ac.uk
Nama Budhathoki, PhD Candidate
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

2. User Generated Geographical information
• Appeared because:
– Increase accuracy of GPS (selective availability)
– Capture devices – from GPS receivers to mobile phones
with integrated camera and A-GPS
– Decrease in storage costs
– Increase in bandwidth with decrease in costs
– Easy to use mapping websites, and wide availability of
base mapping
• Results: User Generated Geographical Content –
Flickr, Geograph, Google Map Maker

3. Flickr

4. Geograph.org.uk
• 9,399 users
• 1.6m images
• 75.5% coverage
• Since last year,
increase of 2600
users, 600,000
images and 4% in
coverage

5. Google Map Maker

6. OpenStreetMap
• Started at UCL by Steve Coast, in the summer of
2004, with the aim to create a crowdsourced
street map of the world
• Many people joined in to help with the technical
infrastructure and collect data. About 40-50
people form the core of the organisation

8. Creating Maps for OSM
(Image source: OpenStreetMap)

10. Mapping parties
(c) Andrea Antonello
(cc) Nick black
(cc) Urbanwide - flickr

11. OSM technological stack (Geostack)
(cc) OpenStreetMap Haklay, M. And Weber, P., 2008, OpenStreetMap – User Generated Street Map, IEEE Pervasive Computing.

12. Infrastructure for Geographical Information
• Starting from scratch Dec 2006
doesn’t get you very far
• GPS provides ‘good
enough’ accuracy
• Imagery and public
domain vector data are
critical

13. Simplified glue – OSM API vs. OGC WMS
• OpenStreetMap API:
http://api.openstreetmap.org/api/0.5/map?bbox=-
71.00,42.00,-72.00,43.00
• OGC WFS API:
http://example.com/wfs?service=WFSSIMPLE&version=0.5&REQUE
ST=GetFeature&BBOX=-71.00,42.00,-72.00,43.00&TIME=2006-09-
12/2006-09-22&OUTPUTFORMAT=text/xml
Importantly, the output is also simple from OSM, while coming out as complex
GML from the OGC variant.
Haklay, M. And Weber, P., 2008, OpenStreetMap – User Generated Street Map, IEEE Pervasive Computing.

14. London after 6 months – 2006/2007

15. England coverage

16. England
coverage
(attributes)

17. Haiti

19. Commercial offshoots: CloudMade /
GeoFabrik / ITO! World etc.
• Use OSM datasets
• Create
information
products on a
commercial
basis, without
explicit profit
sharing models
• Communal
payback exist in
all these cases

20. Business based on open geographical data:
• New applications, focus on growth area – mobile,
VC backed (CloudMade)
• Expertise in use of data (GeoFabrik)
• Niche specialism (transport) leveraged by the use
of free data (ITO! World)
• New products (Fluid Form) – Earring
Source: Plepe.at Source: fluid Form

21. Theoretical framework for VGI motivation
• Unique ethos • Recognition
• Learning • Career
• Fun • Reciprocity
• Instrumentality • Community
• Recreation • Monetary
• Meeting self need • Socio-political
• Altruism
Clary et al. (1998), Clary and Synder (1999); Stebbins (1982), Gould et al. (2008); Wasko and Faraj (2005), Lee et
al. (2008), Hertel et al. (2003), Shah (2006), Hippel and Krogh (2003), Nov (2007),

22. Patterns of engagement
Never mapped
(90,986) 69%
Mapped and
All registered Mapped once
stopped
users (131,575) (3670) 2.8%
(26,106) 20%
Mapping Occasional
(14,483) 11% (9101) 6.9%
Active (1712)
1.3%
Source: CloudMade, July 2009

23. Contribution
Registered Users
117,000
Mappers Non-mappers
33452 (29%) 83548 (71%)
One-timers >100 nodes >1000 >10000 >100000
14834 (44%) (46%) (21%) (5%) (0.6%)
Source: www.openstreetmap.org
http://downloads.cloudmade.com/ (Accessed on April, 2009)

24. Who collects?
Top 25
contributors
Data for England, March 2008

25. Contribution by Continent
One-time contributors >100 Node >1000 Node
>10000 Node >100000 Node
80
70
Mappers (in %)
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
Africa Asia Europe North South
America America

26. Contribution behaviour (Europe)

27. Number of Users Area covered (Sq Km)
1 40021
2 20720
3 9136
4 4184
5 1986
6 936
7 448
8 269
9 139
10 and above 246

28. (c) Dair Grant
Who collects?
(cc) Shaun McDonald
(cc) Chris Fleming

29. Gender
Female Prefer not to
(3%) answer
(1%)
Male
(96%)
N=426

30. Age
Below 20
years
Above (4%)
50 years
(10%)
41-50 years 20-30 years
(22%) (32%)
31-40 years
(32%)

31. Education
Doctoral High School or
degree lower
(8%) (5%)
Some College
Post-graduate (17%)
degree
(21%)
College/
University
degree
(49%)

32. Occupation
Other
(3%)
Freelancer Student
(i.e. self (17%)
Retired from
Employment employed)
(2%) (15%)
Employed
(63%)

33. Motivations
……………commercial mapping products are constantly
failing us up here in rural Quebec. On a number of
occasions my husband and I have both wished that we
could just upload our own GPS data to fix the existing
maps.
It's all frustratingly out of date--showing non-existent
logging roads as real streets, and not showing major
interurban routes. I suspect that in many rural parts of
Canada neither government nor industry has any
motivation to verify old data.
Mapper A

34. How will the involvement of commercial
companies affect your contribution to the
project?
80
70 75.6%
60
50
40
30
20
10 12.1%
7.3% 5%
0
It will increase I will decrease my It will not affect I will stop
my contribution contribution my contribution contributing

35. Conclusions – Users (and impact on quality)
• Participants are mostly man, in their 20-40, with
significant education and technology related jobs
• Participation inequality is a core attribute of all
User Generated Content (UGC), and VGI too
• However, VGI suffers from the ‘tyranny of
Geography’ – i.e. you must be at a certain place
to record it properly. This is a unique problem to
VGI

36. Conclusions – applications and updates
• Applications – few that are completely novel
(earrings, cakes) but most are taking advantage
from reduced entry costs
• Licensing (commercial vs. egalitarian)
• Updates to core infrastructure similar to other
open source projects, with some signs of
maturity which complicates the speed of change

37. Further reading
• Haklay, M., 2008, How good is OpenStreetMap information? A comparative study of OpenStreetMap
and Ordnance Survey datasets for London and the rest of England, submitted to Environment and
Planning B.
• Haklay, M. And Weber, P., 2008, OpenStreetMap – User Generated Street Map, IEEE Pervasive
Computing.
• Haklay, M., Singleton, A., and Parker, C., 2008, Web mapping 2.0: the Neogeography of the Geoweb,
Geography Compass
• Haklay, M., 2008, Open Knowledge – learning from environmental information, presented at the Open
Knowledge Conference (OKCon) 2008, London, 15 March.
• Haklay, M., 2007, OSM and the public - what barriers need to be crossed? presented at State of the Map
conference, Manchester, UK, 14-15 July.
• Budhathoki, N. R., and Nedovic-Budic, Z. (2007). Expanding the SDI Knowledge Base. In H. Onsrud
(Ed.), Research and Theory in Advancing Spatial Data Infrastructure Redlands: ESRI Press.
• Budhathoki, N. R., Bruce, B. (Chip), and Nedovic-Budic, Z. (2008). Reconceptualizing the role of the user
of spatial data infrastructure. GeoJournal 72(3-4), 149-160.
• Budhathoki, N. R., Nedovic-Budic, Z. & Bruce, B. (Chip) (2010, in press). An Interdisciplinary Frame for
Understanding Volunteered Geographic Information. Geomatica, The Journal of Geospatial
Information, Technology and Practice
To get a copy, write to m.haklay@ucl.ac.uk , or nbudhat2@illinois.edu