Check The Places
Check places in OpenStreetMap against data from All The Places
About
OpenStreetMap is a free, community-made map of the world that anyone can edit and use.
All The Places is an open‑source collection of web scrapers to extract geographic data about businesses such as shop or fast food chains.
Check The Places compares data from All The Places with OpenStreetMap to help mappers keep OpenStreetMap data complete and up-to-date.
Get started
🇩🇪 Germany
How it works
The comparison between All The Places and OpenStreetMap happens by brand and by country. All The Places runs their scrapers and publishes the results roughly every two weeks. The data for each brand is downloaded from the latest run.
OpenStreetMap is queried via the Overpass
API. When querying for one chain such as “Netto” supermarkets in Germany, the query would be for the
expected main type, shop=supermarket in this case, for the name to be
Netto Marken-Discount or Netto City, or for the
brand:wikidata to be
Q879858.
The assumptions are that the brand websites are more up-to-date than OpenStreetMap regarding the existence or non-existence of their branches. OpenStreetMap typically lags behind store openings or closures. On the other hand, the geocoordinates in OpenStreetMap are very precise, while the brand websites’ often are not. Many use geocoded addresses which can be off quite a bit.
An attempt is made to find a one-to-one match between the two location data sets. First they are matched
based on the website. This works well if each store has a unique URL. Next, stores are
matched by spatial proximity. The OpenStreetMap data is also checked for duplicates, which can happen
e.g. if a store is tagged on a building outline, but also as additional point inside the building.
We get four sets of points out of this process:
- Matched points. We can check All The Places’ data for additional info such as website or opening hours which could be added to OpenStreetMap.
- Unmatched in OpenStreetMap. These might be new stores which are not yet mapped, stores which are mapped with wrong name or brand tags, or many other such cases. A mapper should take a look and add the store to OpenStreetMap if it is indeed missing.
- Unmatched in All The Places. These might be stores that have been closed. A mapper should take a look, investigate the object’s history and delete it if the store indeed doesn’t exist any longer.
- Potential duplicates in OpenStreetMap. If they are indeed duplicates they should be merged. Sometimes two different stores are very close by, in which case they should be left alone.
No changes are made directly to OpenStreetMap. The output of the process are one report per brand, listing above findings. An OpenStreetMap mapper can take these as hints which locations to investigate and decide on their own if and how to improve the data.
How to contribute
Browse the reports, pick a brand and check the reported differences in location data. Edit OpenStreetMap to add missing shops or to update outdated information.
If there‘s a brand you would like to see covered, please check All The Places whether they already have a spider for it. If not, please see their documentation how to contribute.
If there’s a brand where a spider already exists, a new top-level tag in OpenStreetMap or a new country you would like to see covered, please create a ticket (TODO where?). New categories or countries can be added, but there should be people willing to work on them. By creating a ticket you can show that there’s demand.
Project-wide metrics
| Metric | Count |
|---|---|
| ATP count | 34228 |
| OSM count | 33365 |
| Unmatched ATP | 3076 |
| Unmatched OSM | 2195 |
| Duplicates OSM | 105 |
See Also
Check out these similar projects:- ATP-OSM experimental matcher – This project tries to match all the ATP outputs against OSM. The results are listed per graticule, whereas in Check The Places the results are listed per brand per country.
- Chain Reaction – Comparing OSM POIs to other listings such as ATP, Geolytix’ Retail Points and other lists. Only for UK.
- atp2osm – Import opening hours and contact info from ATP for existing POIs in OSM. Only in France.
- qa-atp-osm – Generating brand difference data based on OSM and ATP.
- Improving OpenStreetMap shop coverage with AllThePlaces – discusson on the OSM Community Forum.
- All The Places US Import– one-time import of ATP data only in the US onto existing OSM objects.
License
This project’s source code is free to use and modify under the MIT license.
The data generated by the project which is derived from OpenStreetMap data is © OpenStreetMap contributors and licensed under Open Data Commons Open Database License (ODbL).