An open source procedure to assess the quality of the OpenStreetMap road network

OpenStreetMap (OSM) is the largest, most complete and most up-to-date geospatial database of the world. One of the most frequently occurring elements within this database is the road network, whose quality is crucial for a number of applications such as routing and navigation. Several methods have been proposed for the assessment of OSM road network quality based on the comparison with corresponding authoritative datasets. However, these methods are often tightly coupled to the characteristics of the authoritative dataset involved in the comparison and this makes it hard to replicate or extend them. This study presents an automated procedure for the comparison of OSM and authoritative road network datasets, based on spatial analysis and driven by the choice of parameters made by the user. The procedure returns measures of the positional accuracy and completeness of the OSM road network.