Spatiotemporal crowdsourcing behavior: Analysis on OpenStreetMap

We in this paper explore the user-editing behavior for the crowdsourcing-based OpenStreetMap service. OpenStreetMap, which is an open-sourced web-based map service, have been recognized as the indispensable means in disaster rescue and recovery. Self-motivated contributors may cooperate and share important geographic information to support many location-based applications in want of instant responses. As compared to commercial-based map services such as Google Maps, OpenStreetMap creates many new research potentials due to its open-sourced nature. However, the user characteristics of OpenStreetMap is not well discussed such far. In this paper, we study the issue “Do contributors behave similarly in different lengths of time intervals?” and “How contributors behave on the emergent cases such as disaster events?”. Surprisingly, we explore the clear power-law phenomenons in most observations. We will demonstrate the new discovery and discuss the help for promising applications.