Today we are launching the 2013 OpenStreetMap Data Report, a beautiful and deep exploration of OpenStreetMap’s incredible momentum, its data and contributors. This report comes in time for State of the Map US 2013, the largest OpenStreetMap gathering to date, kicking off today in San Francisco.
We’ve looked back on the project’s 10 years in the making, the skyrocket growth to over 1 million users, 21 million miles, and 78 million buildings, and tried for the first time to tell the story of OpenStreetMap as a whole in data. We have traced through OpenStreetMap’s 67,629,368 roads and tallied up the incredible sum of 21 million miles - that’s 40 years of driving at 60 miles per hour.
What’s striking is OpenStreetMap’s growing global coverage and freshness of data. Working with the data artist Eric Fischer we have created these renderings of OpenStreetMap data, showing roads colored by currentness. Red roads have been edited most recently:
OpenStreetMap road data in Tokyo. Red roads have been updated most recently
OpenStreetMap road data in the United States. Red Roads have been updated most recently
OpenStreetMap is unique in being created and maintained by its users, so this report is as much about the data as it is about individuals: As examples, this report highlights the work of Ian Dees who lead a project to map thousands of buildings in Chicago, or Serge Wroclawski who wrote and operated a project to fix over four million contracted road names, or Frederik Ramm who investigated the most mapped areas on earth.
Chicago before and after the building and address import
Eric Fischer and myself will give a talk about the OpenStreetMap Data Report at State of the Map in San Francisco on Saturday 2:15 PM Pacific time. If you can’t make it to the conference, you can watch the talk live on the conference web site’s video stream.