OSM data quality assessment: producing map to illustrate data quality

As mentionned in a previous article dedicated to metadata extraction, we have to focus on element metadata itself if we want to produce valuable information about quality. The first questions to answer here are straightforward: what is an OSM element? and how to extract its associated metadata?. This part is relatively similar to the job already done with users.

We know from previous analysis that an element is created during a changeset by a given contributor, may be modified several times by whoever, and may be deleted as well. This kind of object may be either a “node”, a “way” or a “relation”. We also know that there may be a set of different tags associated with the element. Of course the list of every operations associated to each element is recorded in the OSM data history. Let’s consider data around Bordeaux, as in previous blog posts:

import pandas as pd
elements = pd.read_table('../src/data/output-extracts/bordeaux-metropole/bordeaux-metropole-elements.csv', parse_dates=['ts'], index_col=0, sep=",")
elements.head().T

   elem        id  version  visible         ts    uid  chgset
0  node  21457126        2    False 2008-01-17  24281  653744
1  node  21457126        3    False 2008-01-17  24281  653744
2  node  21457126        4    False 2008-01-17  24281  653744
3  node  21457126        5    False 2008-01-17  24281  653744
4  node  21457126        6    False 2008-01-17  24281  653744

This short description helps us to identify some basic features, which are built in the following snippets. First we recover the temporal features:

elem_md = (elements.groupby(['elem', 'id'])['ts']
            .agg(["min", "max"])
            .reset_index())
elem_md.columns = ['elem', 'id', 'first_at', 'last_at']
elem_md['lifespan'] = (elem_md.last_at - elem_md.first_at)/pd.Timedelta('1D')
extraction_date = elements.ts.max()
elem_md['n_days_since_creation'] = ((extraction_date - elem_md.first_at)
                                  / pd.Timedelta('1d'))
elem_md['n_days_of_activity'] = (elements
                              .groupby(['elem', 'id'])['ts']
                              .nunique()
                              .reset_index())['ts']
elem_md = elem_md.sort_values(by=['first_at'])

                                    213418
elem                                  node
id                               922827508
first_at               2010-09-23 00:00:00
last_at                2010-09-23 00:00:00
lifespan                                 0
n_days_since_creation                 2341
n_days_of_activity                       1

Then the remainder of the variables, e.g. how many versions, contributors, changesets per elements:

    elem_md['version'] = (elements.groupby(['elem','id'])['version']
                          .max()
                          .reset_index())['version']
    elem_md['n_chgset'] = (elements.groupby(['elem', 'id'])['chgset']
                           .nunique()
                           .reset_index())['chgset']
    elem_md['n_user'] = (elements.groupby(['elem', 'id'])['uid']
                         .nunique()
                         .reset_index())['uid']
    osmelem_last_user = (elements
                         .groupby(['elem','id'])['uid']
                         .last()
                         .reset_index())
    osmelem_last_user = osmelem_last_user.rename(columns={'uid':'last_uid'})
    elements = pd.merge(elements, osmelem_last_user,
                       on=['elem', 'id'])
    elem_md = pd.merge(elem_md,
                       elements[['elem', 'id', 'version', 'visible', 'last_uid']],
                       on=['elem', 'id', 'version'])
    elem_md = elem_md.set_index(['elem', 'id'])
    elem_md.sample().T

elem                                  node
id                              1340445266
first_at               2011-06-26 00:00:00
last_at                2011-06-27 00:00:00
lifespan                                 1
n_days_since_creation                 2065
n_days_of_activity                       2
version                                  2
n_chgset                                 2
n_user                                   1
visible                              False
last_uid                            354363

As an illustration we have above an old two-versionned node, no more visible on the OSM website.

This set of features is only descriptive, we have to add more information to be able to characterize OSM data quality. That is the moment to exploit the user classification produced in the last blog post!

As a recall, we hypothesized that clustering the users permits to evaluate their trustworthiness as OSM contributors. They are either beginners, or intermediate users, or even OSM experts, according to previous classification.

Each OSM entity may have received one or more contributions by users of each group. Let’s say the entity quality is good if its last contributor is experienced. That leads us to classify the OSM entities themselves in return!

How to include this information into element metadata?

We first need to recover the results of our clustering process.

user_groups = pd.read_hdf("../src/data/output-extracts/bordeaux-metropole/bordeaux-metropole-user-kmeans.h5", "/individuals")
user_groups.head()

           PC1       PC2       PC3       PC4       PC5       PC6  Xclust
uid                                                                     
1626 -0.035154  1.607427  0.399929 -0.808851 -0.152308 -0.753506       2
1399 -0.295486 -0.743364  0.149797 -1.252119  0.128276 -0.292328       0
2488  0.003268  1.073443  0.738236 -0.534716 -0.489454 -0.333533       2
5657 -0.889706  0.986024  0.442302 -1.046582 -0.118883 -0.408223       4
3980 -0.115455 -0.373598  0.906908  0.252670  0.207824 -0.575960       5

As a remark, there were several important results to save after the clustering process; we decided to serialize them into a single binary file. Pandas knows how to manage such file, that would be a pity not to take advantage of it!

We recover the individuals groups in the eponym binary file tab (column Xclust), and only have to join it to element metadata as follows:

elem_md = elem_md.join(user_groups.Xclust, on='last_uid')
elem_md = elem_md.rename(columns={'Xclust':'last_uid_group'})
elem_md.reset_index().to_csv("../src/data/output-extracts/bordeaux-metropole/bordeaux-metropole-element-metadata.csv")
elem_md.sample().T

elem                                  node
id                              1530907753
first_at               2011-12-04 00:00:00
last_at                2011-12-04 00:00:00
lifespan                                 0
n_days_since_creation                 1904
n_days_of_activity                       1
version                                  1
n_chgset                                 1
n_user                                   1
visible                               True
last_uid                             37548
last_uid_group                           2

From now, we can use the last contributor cluster as an additional information to generate maps, so as to study data quality…

Wait… There miss another information, isn’t it? Well yes, maybe the most important one, when dealing with geospatial data: the location itself!

Even if Pyosmium library is able to retrieve OSM element geometries, we realized some tests with an other OSM data parser here: osm2pgsql.

We can recover geometries from standard OSM data with this tool, by assuming the existence of an osm database, owned by user:

osm2pgsql -E 27572 -d osm -U user -p bordeaux_metropole --hstore ../src/data/raw/bordeaux-metropole.osm.pbf

We specify a France-focused SRID (27572), and a prefix for naming output databases point, line, polygon and roads.

We can work with the line subset, that contains the physical roads, among other structures (it roughly corresponds to the OSM ways), and build an enriched version of element metadata, with geometries.

First we can create the table bordeaux_metropole_geomelements, that will contain our metadata…

DROP TABLE IF EXISTS bordeaux_metropole_elements;
DROP TABLE IF EXISTS bordeaux_metropole_geomelements;
CREATE TABLE bordeaux_metropole_elements(
       id int,
       elem varchar,
       osm_id bigint,
       first_at varchar,
       last_at varchar,
       lifespan float,
       n_days_since_creation float,
       n_days_of_activity float,
       version int,
       n_chgsets int,
       n_users int,
       visible boolean,
       last_uid int,
       last_user_group int
);

…then, populate it with the data accurate .csv file…

COPY bordeaux_metropole_elements
FROM '/home/rde/data/osm-history/output-extracts/bordeaux-metropole/bordeaux-metropole-element-metadata.csv'
WITH(FORMAT CSV, HEADER, QUOTE '"');

…and finally, merge the metadata with the data gathered with osm2pgsql, that contains geometries.

SELECT l.osm_id, h.lifespan, h.n_days_since_creation,
h.version, h.visible, h.n_users, h.n_chgsets,
h.last_user_group, l.way AS geom
INTO bordeaux_metropole_geomelements
FROM bordeaux_metropole_elements as h
INNER JOIN bordeaux_metropole_line as l
ON h.osm_id = l.osm_id AND h.version = l.osm_version
WHERE l.highway IS NOT NULL AND h.elem = 'way'
ORDER BY l.osm_id;

Wow, this is wonderful, we have everything we need in order to produce new maps, so let’s do it!

As a first insight on OSM elements, we can plot each OSM ways regarding simple features like the number of users who have contributed, the number of version or the element anteriority.

With the first two maps, we see that the ring around Bordeaux is the most intensively modified part of the road network: more unique contributors are implied in the way completion, and more versions are designed for each element. Some major roads within the city center present the same characteristics.

If we consider the anteriority of OSM roads, we have a different but interesting insight of the area. The oldest roads are mainly located within the city center, even if there are some exceptions. It is also interesting to notice that some spatial patterns arise with temporality: entire neighborhoods are mapped within the same anteriority.

To go deeper into the mapping analysis, we can use the INSEE carroyed data, that divides France into 200-meter squared tiles. As a corollary OSM element statistics may be aggregated into each tile, to produce additional maps. Unfortunately an information loss will occur, as such tiles are only defined where people lives. However it can provides an interesting alternative illustration.

To exploit such new data set, we have to merge the previous table with the accurate INSEE table. Creating indexes on them is of great interest before running such a merging operation:

CREATE INDEX insee_geom_gist
ON open_data.insee_200_carreau USING GIST(wkb_geometry);
CREATE INDEX osm_geom_gist
ON bordeaux_metropole_geomelements USING GIST(geom);

DROP TABLE IF EXISTS bordeaux_metropole_carroyed_ways;
CREATE TABLE bordeaux_metropole_carroyed_ways AS (
SELECT insee.ogc_fid, count(*) AS nb_ways,
avg(bm.version) AS avg_version, avg(bm.lifespan) AS avg_lifespan,
avg(bm.n_days_since_creation) AS avg_anteriority,
avg(bm.n_users) AS avg_n_users, avg(bm.n_chgsets) AS avg_n_chgsets,
insee.wkb_geometry AS geom
FROM open_data.insee_200_carreau AS insee
JOIN bordeaux_metropole_geomelements AS bm
ON ST_Intersects(insee.wkb_geometry, bm.geom)
GROUP BY insee.ogc_fid
);

As a consequence, we get only 5468 individuals (tiles), a quantity that must be compared to the 29427 roads previously handled… This operation will also simplify the map analysis!

We can propose another version of previous maps by using Qgis, let’s consider the average number of contributors per OSM roads, for each tile:

Last but not least, the information about last user cluster can shed some light on OSM data quality: by plotting each roads according to the last user who has contributed, we might identify questionable OSM elements!

We simply have to design similar map than in previous section, with user classification information:

According to the clustering done in the previous article (be careful, the legend is not the same here…), we can make some additional hypothesis:

• Light-blue roads are OK, they correspond to the most trustful cluster of contributors (91.4% of roads in this example)
• There is no group-0 road (group 0 corresponds to cluster C2 in the previous article)… And that’s comforting! It seems that “untrustworthy” users do not contribute to roads or -more probably- that their contributions are quickly amended.
• Other contributions are made by intermediate users: a finer analysis should be undertaken to decide if the corresponding elements are valid. For now, we can consider everything is OK, even if local patterns seem strong. Areas of interest should be verified (they are not necessarily of low quality!)

For sure, it gives a fairly new picture of OSM data quality!