Matching assessment of road network objects of volunteered geographic information

Abstract

Recently new concepts such as free data or Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) emerged on Web 2.0 technologies.  OpenStreetMap (OSM) is one of the most representative projects of this trend. Geospatial data from different source often has variable accuracy levels due to different data collection methods; therefore the most concerning problem with (OSM) is its unknown quality, [1].

This study aims to develop a specific tool which can analyze and assess the possibility matching of OSM road features with reference dataset using Matlab programming language. This tool applied on two different study areas in Iraq (Baghdad and Karbala), in order to verify if the OSM data has the same quality in both study areas. This program, in general, consists of three parts to assess OSM data accuracy: input data, measured and analysis, output results. The output of Matlab program has been represented as graphs. These graphs showed the number of roads during different periods such as each half meter or one meter for length and every half degree for directions, and so on .The results of the compared datasets for two case studies give the large number of roads during the first period. This indicates that the differences between compared datasets were small. The results showed that the case study of Baghdad was more accurate than the case study of holy Karbala.