OSM Poi analyzer: A platform for assessing position of POIs in OpenStreetMap

Abstract

In recent years, more and increased participation in Volunteered Geographical Information (VGI) projects provides enough data coverage for most places around the world for ordinary mapping and navigation purposes, however, the positional credibility of contributed data becomes more and more important to bring a long-term trust in VGI data. Today, it is hard to draw a definite traditional boundary between the authoritative map producers and the public map consumers and we observe that more and more volunteers are joining crowdsourcing activities for collecting geodata, which might result in higher rates of man-made mistakes in open map projects such as OpenStreetMap. While there are some methods for monitoring the accuracy and consistency of the created data, there is still a lack of advanced systems to automatically discover misplaced objects on the map. One feature type which is contributed daily to OSM is Point of Interest (POI). In order to understand how likely it is that a newly added POI represents a genuine real-world feature scientific means to calculate a probability of such a POI existing at that specific position is needed. This paper reports on a new analytic tool which dives into OSM data and finds co-existence patterns between one specific POI and its surrounding objects such as roads, parks and buildings. The platform uses a distance-based classification technique to find relationships among objects and tries to identify the high-frequency association patterns among each category of objects. Using such method, for each newly added POI, a probabilistic score would be generated, and the low scored POIs can be highlighted for editors for a manual check. The same scoring method can be used for existing registered POIs to check if they are located correctly. For a sample study, this paper reports on the evaluation of 800 pre-registered ATMs in Paris with associated scores to understand how outliers and fake entries could be detected automatically.