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I'm heading towards using the MapQuest Open myself, which seems to be a good default.

I think a heatmap of OSM quality would help a lot. Does such a thing exist?



There's not really a good metric of "OSM quality" yet.

The only things I can suggest are:

- issues: number reported, number closed, diversity of reporters and closers - on the basis that if lots ofpeople are reporting issues, that means "many eyes make all bugs shallow" might be working. If lots of people are closing them, then someone is actually paying some attention.

- tag diversity. Human mappers tend to actually use a fairly wide variety of tags for points of interest.

- some measure of how much the data that has been imported from, say, government public domain GIS datasets, has been modified.

- last update

- presence of house/building names and numbers

There's a bunch of similar stuff up at http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Quality_assurance


In the U.S., there are various efforts to compare the OSM data to TIGER data from after Census started their big quality improvement project. They go a long ways towards showing where people are actually working on OSM (which has a rough correlation with quality).




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