Characterizing behaviors of territorial-dispute-related mapping in OpenStreetMap

ABSTRACT

OpenStreetMap (OSM) as one of the most successful projects of Volunteered Geographical Information (VGI) has attracted millions of contributors to work together and produces massive open geographical data. However, the co-work does not always run smoothly since mapping can involve conflicted understandings of the reality. In this paper, we investigate behaviors of mapping related to territorial disputes to reveal the characteristics of contributions and examine the contradictions between ground truth as the vision of OSM and the theory of critical cartography. We perform our experiments from the perspectives of entities, changesets, and contributors using the full history data of OSM. The experiments show that territorial-dispute-related contributions have substantially different characteristics from various aspects but they cannot be treated as outliers either, considering that most contributors do not focus on disputed boundaries. Interpreting OSM data as a converging state to ground truth or equally opinions can both be inaccurate. We also find that mapping disputes may not be absolutely negative in a VGI project.

Key policy highlights

• We perform quantitative, large-scale (global) analysis of dispute-related mapping. The results show that territorial-dispute-related contributions and contributors are different from contributions and contributors in general.

• Territorial-dispute-related mapping is not an independent phenomenon for OSM. The contributors make much more disputes-unrelated contributions.

• Dispute-related entities have more (divergent) versions than normal boundaries, attract more participants, and are more semantically complete, especially for names.

• Dispute-related changesets generally attract more discussions. The spatial distribution of the dispute-related changesets is consistent with real-world territorial disputes and very different from that of all boundary-related changesets and all changesets.

• Contributors who participate in dispute-related contributions are generally more active. These users tend to have a special interest in boundaries but most of them do not focus on disputed boundaries.

KEYWORDS:

• OpenStreetMap
• VGI
• territorial disputes
• mapping behavior
• GIS

Acknowledgments

Map data copyrighted OpenStreetMap contributors and available from https://www.openstreetmap.org.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available in Science Data Bank at, 10.11922/sciencedb.01399. These data were derived from the following resources available under the Open Data Commons Open Database License: https://planet.openstreetmap.org.

Notes

1. https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Ground_truth.

2. https://osmcode.org/osmium-tool/.

3. https://osmcode.org/libosmium/.

4. https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/libpq.html.

5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_territorial_disputes.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant 42101434.