A comparison of the street networks of Navteq and OSM in Germany

In Germany, the data of the Open Street Map project has become available as an alternative to proprietary road networks in commercial business geomatics software, and their customers are wondering whether the quality may be sufficient. This paper describes an implemented methodology to compare OSM street data with those of Navteq for all populated roads in Germany. As a unique feature, the presented methodology is based on a matching between the street objects of OSM and Navteq, and all steps are fully automated so that they can be applied to updated versions of both data sets. While there are considerable qualitative differences between regions, towns, and street categories, at a national level the relative completeness of objects, their relative precision and the relative completeness of names are high enough for maps. However, other attributes, which are needed for the computation of catchment areas, are still relatively incomplete.