OpenStreetMap data use cases during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic

TL;DR

This paper examines how OpenStreetMap was utilized during the initial months of the COVID-19 pandemic, highlighting diverse use cases, data collection efforts, and its role in supporting crisis response globally.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of COVID-19-related OSM use cases, categorizing them into research frameworks and demonstrating OSM's significant role in pandemic response.

Findings

OSM was heavily used for COVID-19 crisis response

Different countries employed OSM in varied ways

Data collection and integration efforts increased during early pandemic

Abstract

Created by volunteers since 2004, OpenStreetMap (OSM) is a global geographic database available under an open access license and currently used by a multitude of actors worldwide. This chapter describes the role played by OSM during the early months (from January to July 2020) of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, which - in contrast to past disasters and epidemics - is a global event impacting both developed and developing countries. A large number of COVID-19-related OSM use cases were collected and grouped into a number of research frameworks which are analyzed separately: dashboards and services simply using OSM as a basemap, applications using raw OSM data, initiatives to collect new OSM data, imports of authoritative data into OSM, and traditional academic research on OSM in the COVID-19 response. The wealth of examples provided in the chapter, including an analysis of OSM tile usage in two countries (Italy and China) deeply affected in the earliest months of 2020, prove that OSM has been and still is heavily used to address the COVID-19 crisis, although with types and mechanisms that are often different depending on the affected area or country and the related communities.