OpenStreetMap in GIScience

Abstract

Land use (LU) maps are an important source of information in academia and for policy-makers describing the usage of land parcels. A large amount of effort and monetary resources are spent on mapping LU features over time and at local, regional, and global scales. Remote sensing images and signal processing tech-niques, as well as land surveying are the prime sources to map LU features. However, both data gathering approaches are financially expensive and time con-suming. But recently, Web 2.0 technologies and the wide dissemination of GPS-enabled devices boosted public participation in collaborative mapping projects (CMPs). In this regard, the OpenStreetMap (OSM) project has been one of the most successful representatives, providing LU features. The main objective of this paper is to comparatively assess the accuracy of the contributed OSM-LU features in four German metropolitan areas versus the pan-European GMESUA dataset as a ref-erence. Kappa index analysis along with per-class user's and producers' accuracies are used for accuracy assessment. The empirical findings suggest OSM as an alternative complementary source for extracting LU information whereas exceeding 50 % of the selected cities are mapped by mappers. Moreover, the results identify which land types preserve high/moderate/low accuracy across cities for urban LU mapping. The findings strength the potential of collaboratively collected LU 37 features for providing temporal LU maps as well as updating/enriching existing inventories. Furthermore, such a collaborative approach can be used for collecting a global coverage of LU information specifically in countries in which temporal and monetary efforts could be minimized.