THE QUALITY OF OPENSTREETMAP IN MALAYSIA: A PRELIMINARY ASSESSMENT

Abstract

Over recent years, the phenomena, Web 2.0 has led to the growth of volunteered geographic information (VGI). The emergence of VGI has played an important role in providing timely data when the costs and its availability is a major concern particularly during emergency and humanitarian efforts. The worldwide crowdsourcing efforts through OpenStreetMap (OSM), the most successful open platform for collaborative mapping have managed to assist authorities such as during the 2017 Mexico earthquake and Hurricane Irma and Maria that impacted several countries in America continent. However, there are lots of arguments on the quality of VGI, particularly in regard to OpenStreetMap (OSM). Therefore, this study was carried out to assess the quality of OSM against authoritative sources using a dataset of Putrajaya, Malaysia. This study assessed the quality of OSM, including completeness, positional and thematic accuracy. From the preliminary assessment, the results showed that the OSM data was good in terms of relative positioning accuracy, particularly in road feature, but still poor in terms of completeness and thematic correctness against the reference dataset. This study is significant with an expected contribution to the assessment of quality of VGI in developing countries that commonly facing slow-paced progress in mapping the OSM. The findings could be used as a basis for various parties that plan to use OSM in Malaysia, particularly Putrajaya as a supplementary data to authoritative sources, including data supplied by the professional surveyors.