Webinar #8 Crowdsourcing Data and Quality Control–The Experience of OpenStreetMap
Channel: World Data System of the ISC
Date: 2016-02-18

Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) is becoming increasingly important in a number of scientific and development domains, and OpenStreetMap (OSM) represents the largest effort to date to harness the power of the internet for crowd-sourced spatial data generation. OpenStreetMap was launched in 2004, initially focusing on mapping the United Kingdom. At that time, Ordnance Surveys and National Mapping Agencies developed roads datasets but did not freely distribute them, and openly available roads data such as VMAP0 were of poor quality. In April 2006, the OpenStreetMap Foundation was established to encourage the growth, development and distribution of free geospatial data and provide geospatial data for anybody to use and share. OSM now has more than 2.3 million registered users, and has mapped more than 34 million km of roads in all countries.