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OpenStreetMap, one geographic database to rule them all?

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OpenStreetMap, one geographic database to rule them all?
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Mapping the railway network for the public, with the public
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542
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CC Attribution 2.0 Belgium:
You are free to use, adapt and copy, distribute and transmit the work or content in adapted or unchanged form for any legal purpose as long as the work is attributed to the author in the manner specified by the author or licensor.
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Accurate description of the railway network as always been a key resource to manage train circulations. To solve common problems of operation simulation requires a great amount of data of high quality. Unfortunately, open data published by infrastructure managers in Europe is not meeting expectations: poor documentation, no information on data quality, low frequency updates, missing data, heterogeneous coverage… In this talk, we will compare current railway network data availability and quality on OpenStreetMap and on company-owned open data platforms of several European countries. Based on this analysis, we will issue usage recommendations for open-source projects needing to use railway network description data. Then, we will share perspectives on the evolution of these data sources on the years to come.
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
Thank you for coming to my talk. I'm very glad that the room is so packed, so I hope that this will be of interest to you. My talk is named OpenStreetMap, one geographic database to rule them all, mapping the railway network for the public, with the public.
And I will focus on OpenStreetMap and open data related topics for OSRD, which is an open source project developed by SNSF, the French railway company, which is part of the Open Rail Foundation. So there are many information about this here on the panel.
Just a few remembers about why the railway company should invest in open data. I think you are all convinced that open data is the way to go for all of projects. But inside the railway companies, it's not always that obvious.
So we want long distance trains across Europe, so we can construct together the transport network of the future on rails. We want to do European cooperations, because we have railway infrastructure managers in all European countries that have the same needs.
And yet we are still paying for different software providers for the same tools and the same data. And of course, we want free competition to prove that all of the train operators we work with are treated the same. So if we share the same source code and the same data, we can ensure that.
I will dive into the specific need of OSRD, which is our project. Of course, you may have different data needs, so I will focus on this. If any in the room have other experience with other types of data, I will be very happy to discuss with you.
So in OSRD, we have four main features. Pathfinding or route compatibility check is to find train paths in the European railway network. Running time calculation is to calculate the time that the train will take to go from point A to point B.
Conflict detection is to ensure that the train will not run into another train during its route. And short-term train planning is to add a new train into the timetable at the last minute. Maybe you were lucky to hear my colleague, Elois, this morning talk about this topic.
So to do these four features, we need a lot of data. Tracks, geometry and topology at track level and not line level. Signals, switches, routes and detectors, which are kind of technical objects. Electrification of the tracks, loading gauge, speed limits, slopes, curves, real-time position of trains,
and stations can be useful for display use. So I've detailed the needs for each of the features, but what you can remind is that we need a lot of data, which is all geographic and in high quality.
So the goal of this study and what I will share with you today is we want to find and compare European level open data to choose the best source for our needs at OSRD, but also maybe for your needs if you're working with the same data needs in your projects.
I've compared four data sources. The RINF or Register of Infrastructure is a data source provided by the Agency for Railways of the European Union. INSPIRE is a European directive that ensures to share geographic data across Europe. Then we can find open data platforms of infrastructure managers, but they are one data platform for each company,
so it can be quite confusing to find good data, and of course they all use different formats. And finally, OpenStreetMap, which is, as you all know, I hope, collaborative database of geographic data,
and it fits all of our needs. We want open data. We want a data model which is consistent across Europe so that we don't have to change the parameter of our tool in each country.
We want a data model that can evolve if we want to add a new feature. Of course, we need English documentation, easy data access, and a wide data perimeter. Let's try to access some data. So here I am on the INSPIRE website.
I can find a broken link in a mixed language. Another example of INSPIRE data, which is supposed to have good metadata. Here you can see the link to access the data, which is in the middle of the page, so very easy to find.
And finally, another example. I could go on and on about this, but this is a page in, I think, Swedish, but it cannot be translated nor copy and paste in any translator. So you have to click and download the data, hoping for the best. This is not to blame the people that have created these pages, but just
to share that finding open data can be very time consuming and very difficult, especially if you, as me, don't talk all the European languages. Then, once you have downloaded the data, we can try to assess data quality. For example, this is the railway network in Italy that I've downloaded from the INSPIRE data set.
And as you can see, there's supposedly a railway tunnel that links Tibet and Sardinia. So I was very, very surprised by that. I checked on the official RFI website, which is the infrastructure manager for Italy.
And in the official website, we cannot find this underwater tunnel. So, of course, I was not allowed to travel across all Europe to check all the data quality that I've downloaded.
In some places, it is true, but there it is not. So first question we want to ask is for all the open data sources that I've found, are they compatible with OpenStreetMap?
In many cases, this is the case. But unfortunately, for the Creative Commons license, we must ask the provider if the attribution in OpenStreetMap is good enough. So this can take more time, and it's not as easy as other types of licenses.
So if you publish open data, it's important to check if the license is compatible with OSM. And as you can see, unfortunately, there are still many European countries where I have found no open data source at all. So maybe it's because I don't speak the language, but still it's problematic.
Then I've done a little quantitative comparison of the data I've found. So this is a comparison of track length, total for one country, so by country and by source. As you can see, I have found data on OpenStreetMap for all of the European countries, but not an open data source that is not OSM for all countries.
And even more, what we can see on the graph is that in every country, the OpenStreetMap data shows more tracks than the open data. So even if there is open data available, it seems that the OpenStreetMap data is more complete.
Then I tried to design an indicator to see if all the useful data was available for OSRD needs. So here you can see the same data needs that I've presented before, and I have classified them by necessity.
So we require tracks and signals to make OSRD run, and then the other data are optional, which means if we have them, this is good, and we will have a better result. But if we don't have them, we can still run our tool and have partial results.
So I've designed an indicator which is good if we have the two required data and two optional data or more. Then an OK indicator if we have part of the required data. The required indicator can be one and a half if we have partial data.
So it's quite complicated, but I have shared the full methodology on the blog, and I will send you the link after, so don't worry. What you have to remember is that this indicator will give you an overview of if the available data can be used for OSRD needs.
So what are the results of this study? First, what we can do is open data. Unfortunately, as you can see, the map is not so green, so there are a few countries where you can do OK or poor implementation of OSRD
using open data, excluding OpenStreetMap, and then we can see the map for the OpenStreetMap data. It's better. It's not that better, but it's better. So there are many countries that were red in the first map that are now green, and there are many countries that were gray that are now red.
So it's not that good, but it's better. What we can see is that OpenStreetMap is the database we should use and improve because it's currently the best standard across Europe.
So as I've said, you can look at the full data and methodology on our blog. So there is the detailed analysis for each country as well as the sources for each open data set that I found.
So if you're interested in one country specifically, you can check out this. I'd like to thank the people that have done the icons for this presentation and also a special thanks for the QGIS community that has allowed me to make the maps and most of the analysis.
So maybe if there are QGIS developers there, thank you so much for your work. And finally, if you want to contact us, there are emails. You can learn more about the OSRD project on our website. You can chat with us. And if you are a railway company, you might be interested in joining the Open Rail Foundation.
So let us know. Thank you for listening.