Investigating the quality of open street map roads data inside Baghdad city

Online collaborative mapping projects such as OpenStreetMap (OSM) provides public and free of charge information. It offers a variety of geospatial features, such as roads networks. In addition it allows users to contribute their local knowledge about the locations. However, there must be a special focus on quality assurance in these community- driven maps. Hence, this study compares the positional discrepancies between the road networks available in OSM and the data supplied by digitizing process for the specific area of Baghdad, Iraq. The analysis is primarily based on the double buffer technique and statistical metrics. The results indicated a significant difference in positional accuracy of OSM compared to reference datasets. However, it is feasible to be used for many limited accuracy applications.