Telenav’s OSM team just released a portal where you can view different metrics on OSM.
Unlike other metrics views that are already available, this new tool for the OSM community is focused especially on navigation attributes like length of navigable roads, the number of turn restrictions, signposts, and many more, in total 22 of such metrics are available. You can check it out at https://metrics.improveosm.org
About the data
Metrics are computed weekly and should be available on the portal at the end of each week. Metrics are generated for the whole world using as input the planet pbf downloaded from the official mirrors made available by the OSM community
Metrics are available starting with 8th February 2016. In the top left corner, you can choose to see them by week, by month, or by quarter. We also have a nice feature for all OSM enthusiasts! For each metric in the left menu, you have a small info button where you see exactly what the metric means: complete description and the rules we applied when computing them, which tags were used if we counted ways, nodes or relations, etc.
How do we do it?
The platform was built using Apache Spark. Using big data technologies enabled us to have metrics for the whole world: on countries, states, counties, and a few metropolitan areas (metros are available only in North America for now). In order to use Apache Spark, we had to convert pbf to parquet first, so we achieved this using a packetizer that is open source and can be found here. After we have the parquets, using Spark’s DataFrame API we managed to have these metrics available in just a couple of hours.
We have also made the latest parquet files available for general use here.
If you have any suggestions or feedback, please do not hesitate to contact us. You can find details in the About section.
Happy mapping!
