Contribution monitoring

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Monitoring contribution in various ways matters to understand how anyone is investing time in OpenStreetMap, make decisions to organize some particular projects or sometimes seek for quality issues.
This page describes methodologies and tools used to measure activity on OpenStreetMap. Our ecosystem is rich from numerous opportunities, academic works and software to build your own monitoring strategy.

Monitoring is here defined as classifying and measuring unitary actions in OpenStreetMap database in order to compute useful indicators. At first it doesn't aim to assess goodness or validity of contribution.
If you seek for quality assessment or error detection, see Quality assurance.

Monitoring contribution is generally relevant for anyone willing to understand how OpenStreetMap was completed or is currently improved in a given area.
It is also particularly relevant for people involved in organized editing activities or topic-focused projects, like projects of the month or project of the week campaigns.

Purposes

Apart from quality assurance and vandalism detection, measuring how people contribute in details will reveal what kind of engagement lead to the current status of observed topics.
It is also useful to refine what encouragement or tooling are the most appropriate for the involved population.

Efficiently dig in OpenStreetMap history

As the Planet history files contains any edition made to OpenStreetMap data so far, it may not be as easy to use as you expect. However it's a necessary ability to get insights about how OpenStreetMap was built.

Digging into history is useful for data stewarding, research and get feedback about how crowdsourced data was gathered along years. As such file size significantly increases, efficient and scalable software is needed to get information you may need.

Spot efforts among the noise

OpenStreetMap community becomes broader every day and contribution increases along. When observed globally, daily contribution stream may look like nothing but noise with undefined pace.
Available tools may help to polarize items that matters for you and highlight some particular relevant actions that hold the information you are seeking for.

In this field, efforts may have different flavors:

• It could be the most prominent changesets to reward committed contributors in some topics of interest
• On the contrary, it could be the least prominent changesets to motivate less engaged people and gather a broader community around some topics of interest.
• Both on the same time with complex scenarios of recruitment and encouragement

Without a structured approach and scalable software you may not be able to process the required amount of information to reach your goals.

Strategies

You can setup and combine different strategies to build your own monitoring, depending on views and needs you may have.
This section aims to provide applicable processes in regard of purposes described upside and available software below.

OpenStreetMap becomes deeper and wider every day. Those strategies are designed to rationalize the amount of information to be processed on a probably short time frame.

Software

Changes tracking

• Real-time change following^↙

  Currently nearly the same content: List of OSM based Services#Live/real-time edits to OSM data

  • LiveEditMapViewerJ is a Java program that allows you to follow changes as they happen on a world map.
  • OSMZmiany is based on LiveMapViewerJ but has some additional features.
• History Browser^↙

  virtuelle-loipe's History Browser with diff tool for single nodes/ways/relations (side by side comparison of two versions).

• magOSM - tracking changes^↙

  magOSM - tracking changes shows changes grouped by thematic and change type on a heat map and give you access to the change detail with several links to other quality assurance tools. Available only on metropolitan France.

• Mapki's Deep Diff^↙

  Mapki's Deep Diff is a diff tool for single nodes/ways/relations. Showing all versions in a table. A bookmarklet is available.

Area monitoring

• WhoDidIt^↙

  The WhoDidIt: OpenStreetMap Changeset Analyzer analyses what was changed in your area. You may need to select "month" or even "half a year" for the "age" parameter to see edits; display could take some seconds. Features an RSS feed to get informed about new changes.

  WTFPL licensed. At least two alternative versions exist. Longer description.

  Live implementations:

  • alternative by simon04 with a speed-up in queries: http://simon04.dev.openstreetmap.org/whodidit
• tyrasd's Latest Changes service^↙

  at https://tyrasd.github.io/latest-changes shows all recent changesets (within a week, day or month) which touched the current map area. Changed objects are highlighted in the map. The object highlight is changing colour (to less intense) with the age of the relevant changeset. Deleted objects (and old versions of modified objects) are shown as faint outlines. OSM_Latest_Changes tyrasd/latest-changes ^GitHub

Topic monitoring

• Clearance^↙

  Clearance [1] is a tool to track changes in OSM by thematic, keep replication extracts up to date, and manage partial/local data updates while respecting quality rules. Rejected data can be fixed in OSM or approved manually. Collaborative reviewing is supported, and all edits are done only in OSM.

• Podoma^↙

  Podoma [2] is a platform designed to manage contribution projects by observing changes in a log, computing KPI and proposing a customized editor to encourage engagement.

  You can access daily results through an API an build dashboards that suit your needs.

Waiting to be completed.

See Quality_assurance#Monitoring_tools for currently available information.

See also

• List of OpenStreetMap based services
• Monitoring notes
• OpenStreetMap statistics