Following on from my previous post on the OSM edit history of the United Kingdom, I was inspired by Gareth Bathers comment to look into the edit “footprint” of some of the larger corporations that utilise OpenStreetMap.
You may not realise it but the majority of consumer mapping applications rely on Open Street Map data in one way or another, including major platforms like Apple Maps and Microsoft Bing. A byproduct of this is that these corporations have large teams of editors updating features on Open Street Map to improve their own maps which are (at least partially) derived from OSM data.
A great aspect of OSM is that it is fairly well documented, including a whole section on the Wiki regarding organised editing teams. From here you can find links to some of the major corporate mapping projects, from which I’ve chosen a sample:
- Apple Maps: https://github.com/osmlab/appledata
- Microsoft: https://github.com/microsoft/Open-Maps
- Amazon Logistics: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Organised_Editing/Activities/Amazon#Editing_team
Each of these repositories lists the OSM usernames of their edit teams which we can use to interrogate the OSM History Nodes public dataset on Google BigQuery. From this we can discover that these 3 organisations alone have contributed an…
