Towards Automatic Vandalism Detection in OpenStreetMap

The OpenStreetMap (OSM) project, a well-known source of freely available worldwide geodata collected by volunteers, has experienced a consistent increase in popularity in recent years. One of the main caveats that is closely related to this popularity increase is different types of vandalism that occur in the projects database. Since the applicability and reliability of crowd-sourced geodata, as well as the success of the whole community, are heavily affected by such cases of vandalism, it is essential to counteract those occurrences. The question, however, is: How can the OSM project protect itself against data vandalism? To be able to give a sophisticated answer to this question, different cases of vandalism in the OSM project have been analyzed in detail. Furthermore, the current OSM database and its contributions have been investigated by applying a variety of tests based on other Web 2.0 vandalism detection tools. The results gathered from these prior steps were used to develop a rule-based system for the automated detection of vandalism in OSM. The developed prototype provides useful information about the vandalism types and their impact on the OSM project data.