Intrigued by Alan McConchie’s presentation on OpenStreetMap past(s), OpenStreetMap future(s), I took a stab at looking at several cities in Asia using a similar approach at charting nodes creation and modification. In his talk, Alan gave a portrayed an ideal scenario where the data is constantly-maintained reaching a state of singularity. Are we seeing any of this trend in Asia?

The only non-Asian city I included is Berlin, Germany (in thick grey). This will be my benchmark as it is widely known that the German community is one of the most active in our community. I intentionally won’t draw specific conclusion to any of the city listed here. Each community is unique and deserves an in-depth look on its own but, I am posting questions that interest me by looking at the charts. Of course, everyone is welcome to share their own insight in the comments!

Cumulative nodes created and edited in the last 10 years

Cumulative nodes created (x) versus edited (y)

At 5 million node limit

At 3.5 million node limit

At 1 million node limit

Some questions

• Most cities had its first edit since the beginning of 2007, but mapping really took-off around 2011. Why is that?
• Compared to Berlin, the cities that has a constant steep upward slope through time are Tokyo, Manila and Bangalore, is this an indication of an active community?
• What’s up with Bangalore? There’s striking increase of creation/modifaction middle of 2015.
• The singularity model doesn’t appear in any of the city. Even for Berlin, the ratio is ~2 creations to 1 modification. No Asian city got this proportion at all. Are we seeing a Borgesian trend in Asian cities or this is just an indication of a young but slowly growing community?

I look forward to any of your insight, please post them here. I am also excited to meet some of our Asian mappers this weekend at the State of the Map Asia. I’m hoping the State of the Country talks can shed more light to what’s happening in these cities. :)

Caveats

Data came from Geofabrik’s country pbf extracts as of Aug 2016. This is not the full history, so deleted nodes were not counted.