Tobias Augspurger

Tobias Augspurger, is an aerospace engineer and atmospheric scientist working to support open-source solutions in climate and energy. He contributes to projects like OpenSustain.tech, an initiative helping surface and connect climate-tech communities, and is involved in collaborative funding and transparency efforts such as OpenClimate.fund. At the Jülich Research Center, he focuses on remote sensing and software development for environmental research. Through Open Energy Transition, he helps improve global open data on power grids to support equitable energy access. Tobias values working with diverse contributors to foster transparency, reduce greenwashing, and enable practical, trustworthy climate action.


Session

08-29
17:55
20min
The Power of quality in OpenStreetMap
François Lacombe, Marina Petkova, Tobias Augspurger

As OpenStreetMap becomes more mature and complete, the challenges now lie in ensuring data quality. Mappers may receive customised feedback on their contributions, and data reusers are seeking greater confidence in the information they rely on.

Over the past year, we at MapYourGrid have been working on assessing and improving the quality of power infrastructure data in OpenStreetMap. This work relies on existing quality assurance and monitoring tools, such as Osmose and Podoma, with a quality comparison approach through a new platform, GridInspector.

With this talk, we aim to share with the community how we built a coherent quality assurance strategy. We will present our experience combining multiple tools, and show how automation can support continuous monitoring and business-grade consistency testing.
We will also explore what comes next: moving towards a highly automated quality assessment process for power infrastructure data. This includes leveraging Earth observation data and designing human-in-the-loop validation processes to balance automation with local knowledge and mapper expertise.
While intended with power infrastructure data in mind, the methods we present are designed to be broadly used in many fields. Thus this presentation won’t be dedicated to the power infrastructure topic but only use it as an example. In fact, we would love to discuss with the community how these tools and methods can be replicated to other fields (i.e. assessing data quality for waterways or road and urban infrastructures).

Attendees will leave with practical insights on building a QA strategy, leveraging existing tools more effectively, and designing feedback loops that benefit both contributors and data reusers.

Data Analysis & Data Model
Talks I / Opening - Amphi Caquot (Coriolis)