Motorway network depiction from openstreet map data in accordance with cartographic demands

Abstract

Roads account for a large and by far one of the most important parts of a map. Main roads, such as motorways, are of a special significance as they represent city and country arteries, as well as connect major locations across countries. Final map products go above exploitation of static base maps and limited map extents. As data amounts and number of representations within a single application grow, so does the difficulty to maintain a neat visualization at all times. Crowd-sourced projects such as OpenStreetMap (OSM) often offer an up-to-date, easy to access base map in areas that are not covered by authoritative data at the level of detail necessary. The world-wide collaboration of OSM users is powerful, yet OSM faces issues regarding data quality and consistency due to the large amount of contributors and vague guidelines of data annotation. In this thesis efforts to answer the question, how to improve depiction of motorways when using OSM map, are made. The result is achieved through coping with challenges and empowering the benefits of OSM data characteristics. This research, firstly, defines cartographic demands regarding motorway depiction, and examines how well OSM major roads comply with the demands. Finally, it offers a few methods for improvements of motorway identification attribute accuracy and extraction of motorway topological relation knowledge. Further these techniques are adapted to motorway network in Austria, tested and the results discussed.