At State of the Map US a few weeks ago in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Seth and I presented a session titled:

PostCards from the Edge: A Tour of OSM Data Analyses + Visualizations

The recording and description of the presentation is available here.

Our goal was to curate a collection of OSM data visualizations from over the years that tell the story of OSM’s evolution, both as a map and a community, as well as highlight a few innovative data visualizations that show new ways to interact with OSM data to learn more about an area of the map.

We produced this spreadsheet (same as the table below) with links and author information for each of the visualizations that we showed and discussed in the talk. Since many of them are interactive, we chose to link to the original source:

Visualization	Author	Year
2 weeks of bicycle courier data in London	Tom Carden / eCourier	2005
OSM Node Density	Martin Raifer	2013-present
Man-made vs. Natural feature density	Jennings Anderson	2016
Object Density	Jennings Anderson	2019
Non-diverse Mapping Density	Jennings Anderson	2019
Haiti Earthquake Response	Mikel Maron	2010
Edits with HOT	Jennings Anderson	2019
HOT Project Activity Timeline	Martin Dittus	2015
The life cycle of contributors in collaborative online communities—The case of OpenStreetMap	Daniel Bégin et al.	2018
Timespan of OSM Contributor Engagement	Jennings Anderson	2019
Cartographers of North Korea	Wonyoung So	2019
Pipelines	Tim Meko, Washington Post	2016
City Street Network Orientations	Geoff Boeing	2018
OpenStreetMap past(s), OpenStreetMap future(s)	Alan McConchie	2016
Optimal Routes by Car from the Geographic Center of the Contiguous United States to all Counties	Topi Tjukanov	2017

A few of the visualizations were from my OSM research work, so I’m compiling them here:

Man Made & Natural Features in OSM

Made with tile-reduce & datamaps, this rendering of OSM data shows natural features (such as ways tagged as natural=coastline) in blue and all other features in orange. Do you know what those large orange rectangles in the Barents and Kara Seas are? View them on OSM.

Object Densities at Zoom level 12

Also made with tile-reduce, this visualization shows the density of objects in OSM as calculated by the number of objects in each zoom-level 12 osm-qa-tile.* At first glance, this figure shows there are few parts of the map that have no data. This is misleading, however. This is really a diverging color scheme where areas that appear blue or purple are unmapped. There are 0-100 objects representing areas of more than 60 square kilometers. In reality, these purple dots are showing us where we know something is there (such as the name of a town, a road, a river, etc.), but it has yet to be more completely mapped.

*Zoom level 12 tiles represent the area of about a small city. Their area decreases at higher latitudes, so normalizing against this would absolve cartographic sin. However, having done this and seen little affect to the message being conveyed here, I present the raw, non-normalized numbers.

Object Densities Broken Down by Contributor Count

Less than 10 mappers since 2018

More than 10 mappers since 2018

These two visualizations show the same density counts as the previous map, but exclusively show only tiles where more than or less than 10 mappers have been active since 2018-01-01. For many parts of the world, these appear to be a population density map (as many maps do). The takeaway here, however, is that while there may not be a lot of contributors active everywhere, there are at least a few contributors active most everywhere.

Contributor Lifespans

These charts are recreations of a chart first presented in Bégin et al. 2018. These charts are all derived from data obtained by querying the history of all OSM changesets (just under 70M) on the OSM public dataset on Amazon AWS with Amazon Athena.

Both axes represent time and each dot represents 1 user. Users that fall along the x=y diagonal are on-time contributors: Meaning their first edit and their last edit are on the same day. The vertical lines that begin to appear represent times when many users made their first edit (x-axis), and then some users continued to contribute for days, weeks, months, and years, creating the line.

Users along the top are still active, meaning their most-recent edit in OSM was near the time when we downloaded the data. The thick line across top means that there are many users who frequently edit the map, regardless of when they made their first edit.

All contributors

Contributors with at least 1 changeset with the text osmgeoweek

Contributors whose first edit was in 2015.

The impact of HOT editing on the growth of OSM

This figure shows the number of changes to the map per day, as calculated from all of the changesets in OSM. The area between the blue and orange lines represents edits in changesets that include the term “hotosm” in the comment.