Search

OpenStreetMap (OSM) as one of the most successful projects of Volunteered Geographical Information (VGI) has attracted millions of contributors to work together and produces massive open geographical data. However, the co-work does not always run smoothly since mapping can involve conflicted understandings of the reality. In this paper, we investigate behaviors of mapping related to territorial disputes to reveal the characteristics of contributions and examine the contradictions between ground truth as the vision of OSM and the theory of critical cartography. We perform our experiments from the perspectives of entities, changesets, and contributors using the full history data of OSM. The experiments show that territorial-dispute-related contributions have substantially different characteristics from various aspects but they cannot be treated as outliers either, considering that most contributors do not focus on disputed boundaries. Interpreting OSM data as a converging state to ground truth or equally opinions can both be inaccurate. We also find that mapping disputes may not be absolutely negative in a VGI project. We perform quantitative, large-scale (global) analysis of dispute-related mapping. The results show that territorial-dispute-related contributions and contributors are different from contributions and contributors in general. Territorial-dispute-related mapping is not an independent phenomenon for OSM. The contributors make much more disputes-unrelated contributions. Dispute-related entities have more (divergent) versions than normal boundaries, attract more participants, and are more semantically complete, especially for names. Dispute-related changesets generally attract more discussions. The spatial distribution of the dispute-related changesets is consistent with real-world territorial disputes and very different from that of all boundary-related changesets and all changesets. Contributors who participate in dispute-related contributions are generally more active. These users tend to have a special interest in boundaries but most of them do not focus on disputed boundaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the rapid advancement and extensive applications of online Volunteered Geographical Information (VGI) projects such as OpenStreetMap (OSM), the persistence of data inequality remains a significant challenge, compromising the global reliability of their data products. This study examines the influence of contributions made by organizations, which have notably risen within the OSM community, on data inequality. The Gini coefficient is utilized to quantify data inequality, while a suite of statistical methods, including spectral analysis and robust correlation analysis, is applied to evaluate the distribution and impact of organizational efforts across various nations. Our findings indicate that organizations predominantly allocate their resources to nations with less complete data and surpass collective efforts of average contributors in mitigating OSM data inequality. Furthermore, the phenomena appears to be particularly significant for NGOs or corporations with humanitarian visions. • OpenStreetMap data exhibit significant inequality among countries, with a reduction within the span of our study (2015–2020). • Organizations contribute more to countries with incomplete data, reducing data inequality more effectively than the crowd. • Organizations with humanitarian visions prioritize countries with the most substantial data gaps. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]