Name
Corporate Editing in OpenStreetMap: Assessing the Impacts on Volunteer Mapping activities in Ottawa, Canada
Date & Time
Wednesday, May 21, 2025, 3:15 PM - 3:30 PM
Description

Founded as a volunteer generated information platform in 2004, OpenStreetMap (OSM)’s popularity has grown and today the platform boasts over ten million registered users. This user base is not composed entirely of volunteer mappers as it was during the foundation of the platform, as corporations employ teams of corporate editors (CEs) to add data and make changes to the global map. Research has shown that CE activity has grown rapidly since its inception and is now represents a significant proportion of global OSM edits, comprising as much as 30% of all edits in 2018. Other researchers have studied the impacts of corporate editing on the global landscape, determining that infrastructure like roads and buildings are of particular interest. CEs contribute a lot of data in the global south, areas which were traditionally underrepresented in OSM, reducing global data inequality. Previous research has also shown that CE and volunteer mappers will edit the same features and revise one another’s work. The focus of this study is on the local impacts of corporate editing on OSM activity in Ottawa, Canada. OSM changeset data accessible through Amazon Athena was queried to isolate activities that fall within the Ottawa-Gatineau region and to separate edits into those made by CEs and those made by volunteers. This data will be used to determine how volunteer mappers responded to the onset of corporate editing in the region. To measure this reaction, volunteer and CE editing activities will be compared after the onset of corporate editing on a variety of time scales, and projections of volunteer mapping activities based on historical data will be compared to the quantity of edits found in the changesets. These comparisons will determine whether there was any significant response from volunteer mappers while accounting for the growth of OSM over the timeframe of the study.

Location Name
Canal (CB) 3400
Session Type
Oral Presentation
Abstract ID
203
Speaker Name
Alex Hoferek
Speaker Organization
Carleton University
Session Name
CS132-A GIS Datascience