<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><p>Nowadays volunteered geographic information (VGI) and collaborative mapping projects such as OpenStreetMap (OSM) have gained popularity as they not only offer free data but also allow crowdsourced contributions. Spatial data entry in this manner creates quality concerns for further use of the VGI data. In this regard, this article focuses on the assessments of geometric and semantic quality of the OSM building features (BFs) against a large-scale topographic (TOPO) data belonging to some areas of Istanbul. The comparison is carried out based on the one-to-one matched BFs according to a geometric matching ratio. In geometric terms, various parameters of position (i.e. X, Y), size (i.e. area, perimeter and granularity), shape (i.e. convexity, circularity, elongation, equivalent rectangular index, rectangularity and roughness index), and orientation (i.e. orientation angle) elements are computed and compared. In semantic terms, BF type coherences are evaluated. According to the findings of geometric quality, the average positional difference was less than three meters. In addition, the perimeter values tended to decrease while area and granularity values tended to increase in OSM data against TOPO data. Those showed that the level of the detail of the OSM BFs was lower than TOPO BFs in general. This was also confirmed by the decreasing tendency of shape complexity according to the parameters of shape element. Orientation angle differences was often low except for some special cases. It was found that the scale of the OSM dataset, even though not homogenous, approximately corresponded to the lower limit of medium scale maps (i.e. 1:10,000) or a slightly smaller scale. According to the findings of semantic quality, in case of the presence of specific type definition, the coherence was rather high between OSM and TOPO BFs while the most OSM BFs did not have a specific type attribute. This study showed that the matching process needed some improvements while the followed approach was largely successful in the evaluation of the matched buildings from geometric and semantic aspects.</p></abstract>

Nowadays volunteered geographic information (VGI) and collaborative mapping projects such as OpenStreetMap (OSM) have gained popularity as they not only offer free data but also allow crowdsourced contributions. Spatial data entry in this manner creates quality concerns for further use of the VGI data. In this regard, this article focuses on the assessments of geometric and semantic quality of the OSM building features (BFs) against a large-scale topographic (TOPO) data belonging to some areas of Istanbul. The comparison is carried out based on the one-to-one matched BFs according to a geometric matching ratio. In geometric terms, various parameters of position (i.e. X, Y), size (i.e. area, perimeter and granularity), shape (i.e. convexity, circularity, elongation, equivalent rectangular index, rectangularity and roughness index), and orientation (i.e. orientation angle) elements are computed and compared. In semantic terms, BF type coherences are evaluated. According to the findings of geometric quality, the average positional difference was less than three meters. In addition, the perimeter values tended to decrease while area and granularity values tended to increase in OSM data against TOPO data. Those showed that the level of the detail of the OSM BFs was lower than TOPO BFs in general. This was also confirmed by the decreasing tendency of shape complexity according to the parameters of shape element. Orientation angle differences was often low except for some special cases. It was found that the scale of the OSM dataset, even though not homogenous, approximately corresponded to the lower limit of medium scale maps (i.e. 1:10,000) or a slightly smaller scale. According to the findings of semantic quality, in case of the presence of specific type definition, the coherence was rather high between OSM and TOPO BFs while the most OSM BFs did not have a specific type attribute. This study showed that the matching process needed some improvements while the followed approach was largely successful in the evaluation of the matched buildings from geometric and semantic aspects.

Geometric and semantic quality assessments of building features in OpenStreetMap for some areas of Istanbul

Department of Geomatic Engineering Division of Cartography

Polish Cartographical Review

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License.

Nowadays volunteered geographic information (VGI) and collaborative mapping projects such as OpenStreetMap (OSM) have gained popularity as they not only offer...

Geometric and semantic quality assessments of building features in OpenStreetMap for some areas of Istanbul

Published Online: Jan 26, 2021

Page range: 94 - 107

Received: Nov 26, 2020

Accepted: Dec 04, 2020

DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/pcr-2020-0010

Keywords
OpenStreetMap, building features, geometric data quality, semantic data quality, topographic data

© 2020 Melih Basaraner, published by Sciendo

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License.

Geometric and semantic quality assessments of building features in OpenStreetMap for some areas of Istanbul

Published Online: Jan 26, 2021

Page range: 94 - 107

Received: Nov 26, 2020

Accepted: Dec 04, 2020

DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/pcr-2020-0010

KeywordsOpenStreetMap, building features, geometric data quality, semantic data quality, topographic data

© 2020 Melih Basaraner, published by Sciendo

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License.

Keywords
OpenStreetMap, building features, geometric data quality, semantic data quality, topographic data