An automated GRASS-based procedure to assess the geometrical accuracy of the OpenStreetMap Paris road network

OpenStreetMap (OSM) is the largest spatial database of the world. One of the most frequently occurring geospatial elements within this database is the road network, whose quality is crucial for applications such as routing and navigation. Several methods have been proposed for the assessment of OSM road network quality, however they are often tightly coupled to the characteristics of the authoritative dataset involved in the comparison. This makes it hard to replicate and extend these methods. This study relies on an automated procedure which was recently developed for comparing OSM with any road network dataset. It is based on three Python modules for the open source GRASS GIS software and provides measures of OSM road network spatial accuracy and completeness. Provided that the user is familiar with the authoritative dataset used, he can adjust the values of the parameters involved thanks to the flexibility of the procedure. The method is applied to assess the quality of the Paris OSM road network dataset through a comparison against the French official dataset provided by the French National Institute of Geographic and Forest Information (IGN). The results show that the Paris OSM road network has both a high completeness and spatial accuracy. It has a greater length than the IGN road network, and is found to be suitable for applications requiring spatial accuracies up to 5-6 m. Also, the results confirm the flexibility of the procedure for supporting users in carrying out their own comparisons between OSM and reference road datasets.