EPIC-OSM: A Software Framework for OpenStreetMap Data Analytics

An important area of work in big data software engineering involves the design and development of software frameworks for data-intensive systems that perform large-scale data collection and analysis. We report on our work to design and develop a software framework for analyzing the collaborative editing behavior of OpenStreetMap users when working on the task of crisis mapping. Crisis mapping occurs after a disaster or humanitarian crisis and involves the coordination of a distributed set of users who collaboratively work to improve the quality of the map for the impacted area in support of emergency response efforts. Our paper presents the challenges related to the analysis of OpenStreetMap and how our software framework tackles those challenges to enable the efficient processing of gigabytes of OpenStreetMap data. Our framework has already been deployed to analyze crisis mapping efforts in 2015 and has an active development community.