Historical OpenStreetMap data provides information about the evolution of the map making process of OSM’s contributors. This data is for example of crucial importance when assessing OSM data quality in an intrinsic manner (i.e. without comparing it to external data sets), which is an important ongoing research topic.

Current work at the Heidelberg Institute for Geoinformation Technology (HeiGIT) at Heidelberg University focuses on enabling the analysis of full-history-planet data by implementing a cloud based distributed database and computing infrastructure specifically for historic OpenStreetMap data. This will allow researchers to work more easily and efficiently with this data than previously possible.

This talk will explain the motivation behind our data quality research, quickly shed some light into existing methods for working with historic OSM data, explain our system design decisions and finally show some interesting applications, results and benchmarks of our system.