• Home
  • About

GIScience News Blog

News of Heidelberg University’s GIScience Research Group.

Feed on
Posts
Comments
« Improving OpenStreetMap missing building detection using few-shot transfer learning in sub- Saharan Africa
HGG Vortrag: “Großmacht Russland? Geographien der Transformation im Bereich der ehemaligen Sowjetunion” , Dienstag 10.05.22, 10ct »

ohsome Region of the month - Back on trail

May 7th, 2022 by Sarah Heidekorn

Welcome back to our Region of the Month series. If you’re hearing about this format the first time you should definitely check out some of our older blog posts, e.g. this one on the tagged forests of different places in Canada or this first part of a street network analysis!

Since it’s May and getting warmer again, we decided to analyze some hiking related tags. Keep reading if you want to find out how we went about in this analysis!

Data:

First things first. As usual, we need some input boundary data for our request to the ohsome API. There are different options like giving coordinates for a boundary box manually or, using an input polygon with all the data, which is what we do here (in this blog post series) most of the time. We got our polygon data here.

Requests:

The next step is to define filter conditions which can be used in a request to the ohsome API.

For a start it would most likely be helpful to look at tags with type:way and figure out which filter conditions would be best to only get actual hiking trails or paths. Unfortunately, as you will soon discover, things are not quite as simple as they may seem first.

In a first step, we wanted to filter some type:way hiking related tags. For this purpose, it should be defined what one would like to count as a “hiking trail“. According the the Cambridge dictionary hiking is “the activity of going for long walks in the countryside“.

For dedicated hiking trails highway=path would be the preferred tag when taking the OpenStreetMap wiki into consideration. For dedicated hiking trails highway=path is be the preferred tag, but according to the OpenStreetMap wikisome further tags are also be used to map hiking related infrastructure.

time=2008-01-01/2022-04-01/P1M

filter=type:way and (highway in (path, track, footway) and not footway in (sidewalk, crossing))

endpoint: /elements/length and /elements/length/density as countries of different sizes were used

Example for a request to the ohsome API:

curl --data-urlencode "bpolys@YourInputBoundary.geojson" \
--data-urlencode "filter=type:way and (highway in (path, track, footway) and not footway in (sidewalk, crossing))" \
--data-urlencode "time=2008-01-01/2022-04-01/P1Y" \
--data-urlencode "format=csv" \
-X POST https://api.ohsome.org/v1/elements/length \
-o YourOutputFile.csv

Data Exploration:

The first part of the analysis was on the increase in absolute values. For that, requests with the endpoint /elements/length were sent to the ohsome API.

In this first figure, the development of all countries considered is shown, and, as to be expected one can see a general increase for all regions. Another rather obvious circumstance displayed in the figure is the fact, that the absolute values of Australia are the highest. This is most likely because it is by far the largest country considered.  Costa Rica displays quite low absolute values of hiking related tags which should be at least in parts related to it being the smallest country. Croatia, Portugal and Australia show a pretty steady growth whilst Iceland and Costa Rica display a less intense gradient.

Because of their difference in size, especially when it comes to Australia, comparing the countries’ values proves rather difficult, which is why another set of requests were sent in order to get a relative value. For this, the endpoint /elements/length/density was used.

As we now have values which are in relation to each region’s size, we can go on and compare the developments easier. One thing that sticks out are the values of Australia, which, due to its size, had the highest absolute values but now happens to be the one with the smallest values. Portugal and Croatia however, are at the top now. Although Croatia displayed the highest values until 2015, Portugal surpassed it and has since been number one. Iceland and Costa Rica display quite low values in this case too, so besides the country size there might be other reasons (different tagging conventions, not as active mapping community, not as many dedicated trails …) that contribute to the given values. Still, both managed to surpass Australia!

Portugal and Croatia both have dedicated pages (Portugal, Croatia) on hiking in the OSMwiki, which might be an indicator that related tags inherit a form of significance within the mapping of these regions, as the documentation is quite good, especially in the case of Portugal.

There seems to be no such thing for Iceland, however, its map feature-page links directly to the general map feature-page whilst giving insight on certain local tagging conventions. Australia appears to have particular conventions/definitions for the tags path and track given, too. Costa Rica does apparently not have a dedicated hiking-page, BUT the information that many tracks (in terms of roads) are unclassified.

To have another relative value with which we could compare the development of the countries, the percentage change of absolute length in km was calculated. For this, we took the absolute values of 2021-04-01 and 2022-04-01 and compared them.

Looking at the development of the last year can help examining the activity and estimating completeness of highway related tags in the different countries with communities which have existed for some time.

Iceland shows a rather low percentual change which could indicate that there are not many more hiking related opportunities in Iceland, or tagging them simply might not be a priority. Together with Croatia, Portugal and Australia the change values are below 10%. Croatia and Portugal, which have generally high values in comparison only display small changes. Alongside with Australia there are still small (but notable) changes.  The highest percentage change can be seen in Costa Rica. It has the strongest individual development at the moment whilst also being the country with a later start date of hiking related tags being mapped.

Due to its sheer size, Australia is definitely the Region of the Month with respect to absolute length development. However, when it comes to relative development of all countries with help of the density-values Portugal and Croatia win the title. Last but not least, Costa Rica clearly should get some credit for the enormous individual increase throughout the last year!

Thank you for reading this first part of our analysis on hiking related tracks, we hope you found it helpful. Stay tuned for part two!

Background info: the aim of the ohsome OpenStreetMap History Data Analytics Platform is to make OpenStreetMap’s full-history data more easily accessible for various kinds of OSM data analytics tasks, such as data quality analysis, on a regional, country-wide, or global scale. The ohsome API is one of its components, providing free and easy access to some of the functionalities of the ohsome platform via HTTP requests. Some intro can be found here:

  • ohsome general idea
  • ohsome general architecture
  • how spatial joins queries work in the OpenStreetMap History Database OSHDB
  • the whole “how to become ohsome” tutorials series
  • GIScience / HeiGIT OpenSource git repositories: github.com/GIScience

Related Literature (usage examples of ohsome.org)

  • Raifer, M; Troilo, R; Kowatsch, F; Auer, A; Loos, L; Marx, S; Przybill, K; Fendrich, S; Mocnik, F; Zipf, A. (2019): OSHDB: a framework for spatio-temporal analysis of OpenStreetMap history data. Open Geospatial Data, Software and Standards.
  • Brückner, J., Schott, M., Zipf, A., Lautenbach, S. (2021): Assessing shop completeness in OpenStreetMap for two federal states in Germany, AGILE GIScience Series. 2(20): 1-7.
  • Witt, R., Loos, L., Zipf, A. (2021): Analysing the Impact of Large Data Imports in OpenStreetMap. ISPRS Int. J. Geo-Inf. 10(8): 528.
  • Fritz, O., Auer, M., Zipf, A.( 2021): Entwicklung eines Regressionsmodells für die Vollständigkeitsanalyse des globalen OpenStreetMap-Datenbestands an Nahverkehrs-Busstrecken.” AGIT ‒ Journal Für Angewandte Geoinformatik. 7-2021.
  • Schott, M.; Grinberger, A.Y.; Lautenbach, S.; Zipf, A. (2021): The Impact of Community Happenings in OpenStreetMap—Establishing a Framework for Online Community Member Activity Analyses. ISPRS Int. J. Geo-Inf. 2021, 10, 164. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijgi10030164
  • Herfort, B., Lautenbach, S., Porto de Albuquerque, J., Anderson, J., Zipf, A. (2021): The evolution of humanitarian mapping within the OpenStreetMap community. Scientific Reports 11, 3037 (2021).
    DOI: 10.1038/s41598-021-82404-z
  • Ludwig, C., Fendrich, S., Zipf, A. (2020): Regional Variations of Context-based Association Rules in OpenStreetMap. Transactions in GIS DOI: 10.1111/tgis.12694
  • Auer, M.; Eckle, M.; Fendrich, S.; Griesbaum, L.; Kowatsch, F.; Marx, S.; Raifer, M.; Schott, M.; Troilo, R.; Zipf, A. (2018): Towards Using the Potential of OpenStreetMap History for Disaster Activation Monitoring. ISCRAM 2018. Rochester. NY. US.
  • Wu, Z, Li, H, & Zipf, A. (2020). From Historical OpenStreetMap data to customized training samples for geospatial machine learning. In proceedings of the Academic Track at the State of the Map 2020 Online Conference, July 4-5 2020. DOI: http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3923040
  • Grinberger, A.Y., Schott, M., Raifer, M., Zipf, A. (2021): An analysis of the spatial and temporal distribution of large‐scale data production events in OpenStreetMap. Transactions in GIS. 00: 1– 20. https://doi.org/10.1111/tgis.12746
  • Further publications

Tags: become-ohsome, heigit, intrinsic quality analysis, ohsome, ohsome example, OSM, visualization

Posted in OSM, Services, Software

Comments are closed.

  • About

    GIScience News Blog
    News of Heidelberg University’s GIScience Research Group.
    There are 1,675 Posts and 0 Comments so far.

  • Meta

    • Log in
    • Entries RSS
    • Comments RSS
    • WordPress.org
  • Recent Posts

    • Assessing road criticality and loss of healthcare accessibility during floods: the case of Cyclone Idai, Mozambique 2019
    • New paper on the automatic characterization of surface activities from 4D point clouds
    • OSHDB Version 1.0 Has Arrived
    • Job Opening for Postdoc / Senior Researcher on OpenStreetMap Road Quality Analysis
    • Geography Awareness Week 14.-19.11.2022
  • Tags

    3D 3DGEO Big Spatial Data CAP4Access Citizen Science Conference crisis mapping Crowdsourcing data quality deep learning disaster DisasterMapping GeoNet.MRN GIScience heigit HOT humanitarian humanitarian mapping Humanitarian OpenStreetMap team intrinsic quality analysis landuse laser scanning Lidar machine-learning Mapathon MapSwipe MissingMaps Missing Maps ohsome ohsome example Open data openrouteservice OpenStreetMap OSM OSM History Analytics Public Health Quality quality analysis remote sensing routing social media spatial analysis Teaching VGI Workshop
  • Archives

    • January 2023
    • December 2022
    • November 2022
    • October 2022
    • September 2022
    • August 2022
    • July 2022
    • June 2022
    • May 2022
    • April 2022
    • March 2022
    • February 2022
    • January 2022
    • December 2021
    • November 2021
    • October 2021
    • September 2021
    • August 2021
    • July 2021
    • June 2021
    • May 2021
    • April 2021
    • March 2021
    • February 2021
    • January 2021
    • December 2020
    • November 2020
    • October 2020
    • September 2020
    • August 2020
    • July 2020
    • June 2020
    • May 2020
    • April 2020
    • March 2020
    • February 2020
    • January 2020
    • December 2019
    • November 2019
    • October 2019
    • September 2019
    • August 2019
    • July 2019
    • June 2019
    • May 2019
    • April 2019
    • March 2019
    • February 2019
    • January 2019
    • December 2018
    • November 2018
    • October 2018
    • September 2018
    • August 2018
    • July 2018
    • June 2018
    • May 2018
    • April 2018
    • March 2018
    • February 2018
    • January 2018
    • December 2017
    • November 2017
    • October 2017
    • September 2017
    • August 2017
    • July 2017
    • June 2017
    • May 2017
    • April 2017
    • March 2017
    • February 2017
    • January 2017
    • December 2016
    • November 2016
    • October 2016
    • September 2016
    • August 2016
    • July 2016
    • June 2016
    • May 2016
    • April 2016
    • March 2016
    • February 2016
    • January 2016
    • December 2015
    • November 2015
    • October 2015
    • September 2015
    • August 2015
    • July 2015
    • June 2015
    • May 2015
    • April 2015
    • March 2015
    • February 2015
    • January 2015
    • December 2014
    • November 2014
    • October 2014
    • September 2014
    • August 2014
    • July 2014
    • June 2014
    • May 2014
    • April 2014
    • March 2014
    • February 2014
    • January 2014
    • December 2013
    • November 2013
    • October 2013
    • September 2013
    • August 2013
    • July 2013
    • June 2013
    • May 2013
    • April 2013
  •  

    May 2022
    M T W T F S S
    « Apr   Jun »
     1
    2345678
    9101112131415
    16171819202122
    23242526272829
    3031  
  • Recent Comments

    GIScience News Blog CC by-nc-sa Some Rights Reserved.

    Free WordPress Themes | Fresh WordPress Themes