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Cited by 462

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 30 of the 30 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

The world’s user-generated road map is more than 80% complete

Open access
Barrington-Leigh, Christopher, Millard-Ball, Adam·2017·PLOS ONE
DOI 10.1371/journal.pone.0180698
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Abstract

OpenStreetMap, a crowdsourced geographic database, provides the only global-level, openly licensed source of geospatial road data, and the only national-level source in many countries. However, researchers, policy makers, and citizens who want to make use of OpenStreetMap (OSM) have little information about whether it can be relied upon in a particular geographic setting. In this paper, we use two complementary, independent methods to assess the completeness of OSM road data in each country in the world. First, we undertake a visual assessment of OSM data against satellite imagery, which provides the input for estimates based on a multilevel regression and poststratification model. Second, we fit sigmoid curves to the cumulative length of contributions, and use them to estimate the saturation level for each country. Both techniques may have more general use for assessing the development and saturation of crowd-sourced data. Our results show that in many places, researchers and policymakers can rely on the completeness of OSM, or will soon be able to do so. We find (i) that globally, OSM is ∼83% complete, and more than 40% of countries-including several in the developing world-have a fully mapped street network; (ii) that well-governed countries with good Internet access tend to be more complete, and that completeness has a U-shaped relationship with population density-both sparsely populated areas and dense cities are the best mapped; and (iii) that existing global datasets used by the World Bank undercount roads by more than 30%.

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Metadata

Authors
Barrington-Leigh, C., & Millard-Ball, A.
Venue
PLOS ONE
Publisher
Public Library of Science (PLoS)
Published
2017-08-10
Volume
12
Issue
8
Pages
e0180698
ISSN
1932-6203 (ISSN-L)
DOI
10.1371/journal.pone.0180698
OpenAlex
W2744637967
Cited by
462
References
30
FWCI
172.83
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
gold

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: The world’s user-generated road map is more than 80% complete. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1371/journal.pone.0180698
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Barrington-Leigh, C., & Millard-Ball, A. (2017). The world’s user-generated road map is more than 80% complete. PLOS ONE. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0180698

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