OpenStreetMap: The Wikipedia of Street Maps

A few weeks ago I blogged about crowdsourcing, giving possibly the best example: Wikipedia. Despite the fact that Wikipedia shouldn't work, at least in theory, due to the probability of errors and the likelihood of vandalism it has still managed to become incredibly successful as well as surprisingly accurate due to its moderation system that prevents errors and vandalism from becoming problems. Clearly heavy moderation of content is a very effective way of making crowd sourcing viable as there is another great crowdsourced project known as OpenStreetMap. It also seems to be succeeding much in the same way as Wikipedia by using similar methods of moderation.

OpenStreetMap uses crowdsourcing to map areas and uses an Open Database License, meaning that anyone is allowed to use the data in the OpenStreetMap database so long as they are not charging for it. It allows anyone to map areas, edit the information of roads and buildings, and add new buildings and roads. This has allowed the project's map of the world to grow very quickly and it has even received some data that is not on some of the bigger companies' maps like Google maps. This is due to the fact that local people can map an area in detail, even down to the extent of labelling different building sections individually with full descriptions. This has also made OpenStreetMap rather popular with small businesses as they don't have to pay to have their business specifically added to a map by the company that owns the map and they don't have to jump through hoops to get anything changed or any details added. Instead they can manually add it themselves.

An example of OpenStreetMap vandalism

Unfortunately this also means that other users can abuse the system and change whatever they want whenever they want and mess with the map. On one hand if the system is not abused then the users can easily contribute to the mapping project as originally intended, by adding  useful and relevant data about houses, roads, and shops. However the main problem with the system is that people may also purposely vandalise the map by deleting landmarks or roads, renaming things to completely different places, or adding non-existent roads and buildings all over the place to confuse people. They could also do something relatively harmless like change their house's name to "Magical Wizard Castle". Another problem with the system is that non-intentional mistakes can ruin the map as well like typing an address as "123 Johnson Road" when you meant to type "23 Johnson Road" which can lead to people being unable to find specific places, or accidentally adding a road out of sync with the map due to lag or clumsiness.

Fortunately the OpenStreetMap system is made to cope with all of the possible vandalism and accidental misinformation that appears. One thing that helps a lot against this is the fact that the majority of the OpenStreetMap community are actually fairly responsible and will often seek out and correct any mistakes or vandalism that they see without any moderator or administrator activity necessary. Sometimes however the vandalism or mistakes are not seen by the community. When this happens moderators step in by checking recent changes and looking for flags from vandalism auto detection algorithms (in other words it tells them if someone makes a lot of changes or names something a vulgar word); the moderators then correct the any wrong changes made either manually, or by backdating to an earlier backup of the area.

Overall this system is pretty effective at preventing vandalism from becoming a problem as even large scale vandalism that goes undetected by the automatic systems can be reported by users and is usually dealt with by a moderator within 48 hours. That being said it is still not always as accurate or as detailed in some cases as other maps like Google maps. Although in a few specific cases it does have more information for certain areas, so depending on what you are looking at it can vary in accuracy and information depth. Despite the risk of getting inaccurate or vandalised content that comes with using crowd sourcing I am quite interested to see what OpenStreetMap will evolve into with time. If 3D modes and street views can be implemented then it could become a great Open License alternative for companies that have to currently pay to use Google maps' data, and a little bit of healthy competition for the big companies is always good for the consumer, so with any luck OpenStreetMap will become a force to be reckoned with. Look out Google! Oh and there's Bing Maps... but no one cares about Bing.

Sources and related links:
https://www.openstreetmap.org/
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Open_Database_License
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Vandalism