Tracking Editing Processes in Volunteered Geographic Information: The Case of OpenStreetMap

With an increasing number of applications building on OpenStreetMap, data quality is becoming a pressing issue. Data provenance gives useful hints that facilitate data quality assessments based on the features’ persistence. However, this requires a detailed analysis of the editing history and the corresponding contributors. In order to make this provenance information explicit, we introduce a provenance vocabulary for OpenStreetMap and show how to annotate OpenStreetMap data using this vocabulary. We specify the different types of patterns that can be found in the provenance of features. This paper therefore lays the foundation for approaches to assess data quality that build solely on the intrinsic information collected in the OpenStreetMap database, using the trustworthiness of features as a proxy function for data quality.