Towards Exploring Patterns of Editing Behavior on OpenStreetMap

OpenStreetMap has a large number of volunteers.There is a hypothesis that volunteers with different cultural backgrounds may have different editing behaviors when contributing to OSM.It may be strongly related to data quality and data reliability on OSM.As for the heterogeneity and the reliability of OSM data,previous research usually focuses on the geometric accuracy,spatial location accuracy and semantic integrity of OSM data,while few researchers have analyzed these problems from the perspective of editing behavior.On the grounds of relationship between mapping motivation and editing behavior,the dispersion of editing trajectory and clockwise direction index are proposed in the paper to explore whether the volunteers are sufficiently motivated and knowledgeable.In the experiments,the historical OSM data of four countries suggested that developed countries have lower trajectory dispersion.The lower degree of trajectory dispersion reflects the higher concentration and professionalism of volunteers.A high degree of drawing direction consistency shows volunteers who mapped French data were natives with local knowledge.From this point of view,this paper verifies that volunteer editing behavior is an effective method to analyze data quality heterogeneity and data reliability.