Has OpenStreetMap a role in Digital Earth applications?

Figures & data

Table 1. A comparison of some of the collaborative editing strategies of Wikipedia and OpenStreetMap. Statistical data are correct as of November 2012.

Characteristic	OpenStreetMap	Wikipedia
Verifiability	A tag/value combination is verifiable if and only if independent users when observing the same feature would make the same observation every time. Testable definitions are documented on the OSM Wiki	‘The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth, that is, whether readers are able to check that material added to Wikipedia has already been published by a reliable source, not whether we think it is true’ (Reagle 2011)
Administrators	Not known however small in number	English Wikipedia has approximately 1500 administrators
Sustainability	Good sustainability: recent change of OSM license structure (May 2012) caused friction amongst many ‘senior’ mappers (Neis and Zipf 2012). Slowly gaining some influential industry support. Must address issues of quality and validation before more mainstream acceptability.	High sustainability: Prasarnphanich and Wagner (2011) uses empirical evidence to show that ‘Core’ contributors (high frequency contributors) are transient but new ‘Core’ groups constantly emerge from more peripheral participation levels. The ‘cost’ of adding new information must remain low (Greenstein 2012)
Admin status	Members assume responsibility for an spatial area or issue - must be trusted by the community and be seen as a productive contributor	No formal process exists as one can assume these positions. There is a community review process to evaluate suitability.
Dispute detection	Detected as rapid changes to values of tags or feature geometries and are considered vandalism. Community vigilance and bot agents assist early detection.	Most notably the ‘three-revert-rule’ where an editor cannot perform more than three reverts on a single page in 24 hr. Community vigilance and bot agents assist early detection.
Dispute resolution	The ‘on-the-ground’ rule is used giving precedence to the names/attribute values people use locally in the disputed area. OSMF Data Working Group can help with arbitration, if necessary.	Focus must remain on the page content and not personally against other editors. Discussion, mediation, third-party intervention, etc. are usually successful in solving most disputes. An arbitration committee is elected each year.
Contents	141 million ways	Approximately 4 million articles
Featured objects	Six million (about 4%) with >15 edits (Mooney and Corcoran 2012a)	Currently, 3586 featured articles

Figure 1. An example of urban meets rural in OSM in Nottingham, UK. The OSM map is compared with Google aerial imagery of the same location.

Table 2. A summary of ‘tag flip-flopping’ from Mooney and Corcoran (2012b). The table shows the number of times the value of the ‘highway’ tag was changed for a large subset of highway objects in four countries with good OpenStreetMap coverage.

Highway	UK	Ireland	Austria	Germany
1.	4999 (59.4%)	4999 (59.4%), 298 (50.5%)	1110 (47.1%)	495 (54.8%)
2.	2621 (31.2%)	222 (37.6%)	855 (36.3%)	271 (30.0%)
3.	650 (7.7%)	60 (10.2%)	305 (12.9%)	110 (12.2%)
4.	117 (1.4%)	8 (1.4%)	78 (3.3%)	22 (2.4%)
5.	22 (0.3%)	2 (0.3%)	10 (0.4%)	5 (0.6%)

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