Assessing shop completeness in OpenStreetMap for two federal states in Germany

Abstract. The completeness of the number of Open- StreetMap (OSM) retail stores was estimated for two federal states of Germany at district level. An intrinsic measurement was applied that fits saturation models on the cumulative curve of the number of OSM retail stores over time. Even though the mean completeness of retail stores was estimated high in both states, the values within the states varied between 42 % and 100 %. The question therefore arises in which areas retail stores are well represented in OSM and whether economically weaker regions are possibly also digitally disadvantaged on the map. We investigated the influence of the urban-rural gradient as well as the influence of socioeconomic factors (gross domestic product, the unemployment rate, the proportion of academics) on the estimated completeness by means of a generalized linear model. Our results indicate that average big cities with low unemployment rate are better mapped with respect to retail stores.