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With version 5 Nominatim has finished the long transition from a simple PHP frontend to a complex Python application. The change wasn’t just about changing the programming language but also about making Nominatim more flexible and easy to use. With that out of the way, the question is what comes next. What can you expect to see in version 6. The road for the next major version isn’t completely paved out yet. This post outlines the major open issues and some of possible next developments.

Auto-completion and spelling correction

Search-as-you-type and some leniency towards spelling mistakes are without a doubt on the top of the list of feature requests for Nominatim. Search-as-you-type will require to change how the internal search indexes are built and accessed. Nominatim’s current search model is not compatible with resolving incomplete queries. When it comes to spelling correction, we are going to need a good model for estimating the similarity between a query and the place names in the database. Simple approaches like Levenshtein distance are difficult for a multi-lingual database of proper names.

Performance and Index Optimisations

A full planet database requires now more than 1TB in disk space. This means that it reaches the limits of what can be done with of-the-shelf hardware. Worse, the search indexes in our backing PostgreSQL database have grown to a size where lookups are becoming noticeably slow. It is time to revisit our database schema, see where tables can be optimised and trimmed down, and consider how search indexes might be better organised differently to trim them down to what is relevant for finding the right place.

Complex OSM objects

Nominatim’s entire processing pipeline is built in a way that it considers one OSM object at the time. That makes processing and updating easy but it doesn’t fit well anymore with how data is modelled in OSM. We increasingly see detailed mapping where multiple OSM objects make up a single real-world object that you may want to find with search. To accommodate that Nominatim’s processing pipeline needs to be adapted, so that it can work with places that do not have a 1:1 equivalent in the OSM world. This also means that the output needs to change. Every result of a search is currently tied to an OSM object. In the future, it is more likely that you will get an abstract place description with references to all the relevant OSM objects.

Addresses as first-class citizens

Physical addresses are not considered searchable places on its own in Nominatim right now. Addresses only appear as an attribute of a place and when you search for an address, you will in fact get all place objects which happen to have the address assigned. That can cause a lot of issues. For example, the more detailed the mapping in OSM becomes, the more objects will be returned for an address search, even though you would have expected exactly one result. Inversely, there are sometimes OSM objects that have more than one address. For example, some house entrances come with multiple house numbers. Or there are houses where the address has changed and which you’d still want to find under its former address. All this cannot be modelled in Nominatim right now.

To enable a true address search, addresses need to become first class citizens in Nominatim that can be directly returned as a result. Places would of course still keep their address attributes but those will only be references to one or more address they can be found under.

Complex categories

Every place in Nominatim currently gets a simple category which is derived from the main tag of its OSM object. This puts some limitation on what kind of category search Nominatim can do. For example, you cannot search for a “vegan restaurant” or a “catholic church” because the main tags only classify “restaurants” and “places of worship of any religion”.

Another issue with the current classification system is that it is bad at handling OSM objects with multiple functions (say, a hotel with an attached restaurant mapped with the same POI node). Nominatim will simply duplicate the OSM object in its database to cover both functions. That unnecessarily blows up the database size.

So it is time to get a way from using OSM tags directly and introduce the ability to define custom classifications. The idea here is to have hierarchical categories (e.g. food.restaurant.vegan) and allow to assign an arbitrary number of categories to each object.

These are the main open issues right now. If one of them sparks your interest and you’d like to help moving them along, don’t hesitate to get in touch. The discussion section on Github and the OSM community forum are great places to start a discussion.

22 hours ago

03/07/2025-09/07/2025

♦

[1] WebGIS of Walkability – Healthcare Accessibility | © Sandro Laudares | Map data © OpenStreetMap Contributors.

Community

• Koreller has tooted ♦ before-and-after maps of the area around the Association Saint-Benoît Labre in Vertou, France, following some detailed micromapping work.
• Mapping water slides for OSM can be hard work. But as Marc wrote, maybe a little fun, too.

Events

• At the 2025 AGIT Conference for Geoinformatics in Salzburg, Pascal Neis presented ♦►♦ a study titled ‘Opportunities and Potentials of Retrieval-Augmented Generation for the Spatial Analysis of Crime Data’. This study used data from the State Criminal Police Office of Rhineland-Palatinate to identify crime hotspots and analyse offence patterns with the help of retrieval-augmented generation techniques.
• Dr Raquel Dezidério Souto has noted that you can now register for the Workshop MPCS 2025, which will be held 100% online and will include case studies in collaborative mapping with OpenStreetMap and other collective methodologies. The event’s broadcast will be in Portuguese and the free registration ♦ can be done at the official website. Raquel would like to thank the participants, partners and sponsors for this opportunity to disseminate great collective practices!

OSM research

• A recent study published in Methods in Ecology and Evolution used OSM data to support wildlife movement research by enhancing built-up area detection from satellite imagery. OSM building footprints were crucial for training deep learning models in the MoveApps platform, enabling researchers to better understand how urban expansion affects animal migration patterns across diverse environments.

Maps

• [1] Sandro Laudares has created the ‘WebGIS of Walkability – Healthcare Accessibility’, which shows POIs related to health (hospitals, clinics, and pharmacies) that can be found within 5 minutes or 15 minutes of walking.
• Djib-carto has developed a web map of the world’s submarine fibre optic networks using OSM and Leaflet. The code is available on GitHub.

OSM in action

• Sven Geggus reported ♦ that smartMOBILITYMAP has developed an interactive OpenStreetMap-based web map for the Durlach Old Town Festival.
• Reclus reported that ARD, a German public service broadcaster, had used ♦ a properly attributed OpenStreetMap-based map to illustrate the ‘Shia Crescent’ spanning Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Iran.

Open Data

• The French department of Doubs has published their cycle node network (a recreational route system consisting of junctions labelled with numbers, codes, or names, connected by node-to-node routes) on OpenStreetMap. It’s one of the first in France, either to build such a network or make the integration with OSM.
  • Fun fact 1: The first integration was done in 2022 by local contributor lejun, the department updated it recently with changes that have happen since then.
  • Fun fact 2: It appears they have entered into a contract with the company Cirkwi to develop a web app similar to the one used in Belgium. However, there are already well-established open source tools available .

Programming

• Karlos has developed OSM-Building-Inspector, a web tool that displays individual OSM buildings rendered in 3D.
• Osmzoso has developed pbf2sqlite, a command-line tool for importing OpenStreetMap .osm.pbf files into a SQLite database.

Releases

• NorthCrab announces the public launch of OpenStreetMap-NG’s test instance, inviting the community to explore its scalable, optimized mapping platform and contribute feedback through a new bounty program.

Did you know that …

• … osm-api-js is a JavaScript/TypeScript wrapper around the OpenStreetMap API?
• … there is a JOSM plugin named SeaMapEditor that adds a preset to make it easier to map some sea marks in OSM, such as lighthouses and harbours?
• … Matt Whilden has expanded the service of his UnmappedSmallTown Mastodon bot to include Canada?

OSM in the media

• Reto Widmer, of SRF, covered ♦►♦ the OST Eastern Switzerland University of Applied Sciences ‘Vampire Mode’ navigation system (we reported earlier), a pedestrian routing system that priorities shaded routes by combining OpenStreetMap data for footpaths and obstacles with three-dimensional Swisstopo data on buildings and trees .

Other “geo” things

• Three experimental LiDAR HD data layers are being made ♦ available by the French government, which can also be accessed by WMTS. Magalie Lèbre offered ♦►♦ more details on her LinkedIn profile.
• For the Tour de France that started Saturday 5 July, L’Équipe is showing ♦ a 3D course for the five most notable days.
• Detlef Borchers, of Heise, reported on a research study that analysed 158 incidents in which navigation systems were in some way involved in serious accidents, emphasising that the popular term ‘Death by GPS’ is mostly just a catchy oversimplification and it is rather the careless use of a navigation application and ignoring road conditions.

Upcoming Events Country Where Venue What Online When ♦ Online OpenStreetMap Midwest Meetup ♦ ✓ 2025-07-11 OSMF Engineering Working Group meeting ♦ 2025-07-11 ♦ Berlin Parzelle III/23b, Kleingartenkolonie Johannisberg, 205. OSM-Stammtisch Berlin-Brandenburg ♦ 2025-07-11 ♦ Zürich Bitwäscherei Zürich 177. OSM-Stammtisch Zürich ♦ 2025-07-11 ♦ Gaborone Online OSM Africa July 2025 Mapathon ♦ ✓ 2025-07-12 ♦ København Cafe Mellemrummet OSMmapperCPH ♦ 2025-07-13 ♦ TAK Kadıköy Tasarım Atölyesi OpenStreetMap Haftasonu Buluşmaları ♦ 2025-07-13 ♦ Ghaziabad Vaishali 18th OpenStreetMap Delhi Mapping Party ♦ 2025-07-13 ♦ MZ Centar II FOSS4G Europe 2025 ♦ 2025-07-14 – 2025-07-20 ♦ 臺北市 MozSpace Taipei OpenStreetMap x Wikidata Taipei #78 ♦ 2025-07-14 Missing Maps London: (Online) Mid-Month Mapathon [eng] ♦ 2025-07-15 ♦ Salt Lake City Woodbine Food Hall OSM Utah Monthly Map Night ♦ 2025-07-16 ♦ City of Edinburgh Guildford Arms OSM Edinburgh Social Meet-up ♦ 2025-07-15 ♦ Online Lüneburger Mappertreffen ♦ ✓ 2025-07-15 ♦ Bogotá Microsoft Teams (Remote) Mapping Party Semanal LATAM Weekly LATAM Mapping Party ♦ 2025-07-16 ♦ Karlsruhe Chiang Mai Stammtisch Karlsruhe ♦ 2025-07-16 [Online] OSM Greece – Διαδικτυακή συνάντηση της ελληνικής κοινότητας ♦ 2025-07-16 ♦ Online Mappy Hour OSM España ♦ ✓ 2025-07-17 ♦ Heidelberg Berliner Str. 45, 69120 Heidelberg Missing Maps Mapathon in Heidelberg MSF ♦ 2025-07-17 ♦ San Jose Online South Bay Map Night ♦ ✓ 2025-07-23 ♦ Kiel Mango’s Kieler Mapper*innentreffen ♦ 2025-07-22 ♦ Berlin Online OSM-Verkehrswende #69 ♦ ✓ 2025-07-22 ♦ Hannover Kuriosum OSM-Stammtisch Hannover ♦ 2025-07-24 ♦ Wien Schlupfwinkel (Kleine Neugasse 10, 1040 Wien) 75. Wiener OSM-Stammtisch ♦ 2025-07-24 ♦ Jalpaiguri Beguntary More (Law College Gate) 5th OpenStreetMap West Bengal Mapping Party ♦ 2025-07-26 ♦ Siliguri Guru Nanak Chowk 6th OpenStreetMap West Bengal Mapping Party ♦ 2025-07-27 ♦ Stadtgebiet Bremen Online und im Hackerspace Bremen Bremer Mappertreffen ♦ 2025-07-28

Note:
If you like to see your event here, please put it into the OSM calendar. Only data which is there, will appear in weeklyOSM.

This weeklyOSM was produced by 115c7a5fac, www.openstreetmap.org/user/IVIDES_org, MarcoR, MatthiasMatthias, PierZen, Raquel Dezidério Souto, Strubbl, Andrew Davidson, barefootstache.
We welcome link suggestions for the next issue via this form and look forward to your contributions.

a day ago

Espero está sea mi ubicación exacta

a day ago

For Turkey: (For Ankara, see keyyushi.)

• Revert/tag correction operations

• Map verification

• Heat Map

Latest OSM Contributors 🇹🇷

Suspicious OSM Changesets It is recommended to change the parameters!

Changesets requesting review

2 days ago

Have a bold, brilliant idea that could improve the OpenStreetMap (OSM) ecosystem? Got a vision for the future of OSM? Then we’ve got good news for you: the OpenStreetMap Foundation is thrilled to launch the 2025 edition of our Engineering Microgrants program!

This program is designed to support community members working on software projects that strengthen the OSM platform and ecosystem. We’re setting aside a total of £30,000, which may be distributed across several innovative and impactful projects. The per-project limit is £6,000, but if your idea goes beyond that, don’t hold back! The Engineering Working Group (EWG) may explore other funding avenues through the Foundation to help bring ambitious proposals to life. As such, we’d still encourage you to apply.

What’s the Process?

It’s simple and fair:

Submit your project idea via our GitHub template. This ensures transparency and reduces the chance of any conflicts of interest.

Our independent jury will review, score, and help select winning proposals through a multi-round process. Each idea will be reviewed not only for its score, but also for feasibility and implementation potential.

Pro tip: Before you hit submit, we strongly encourage all applicants to reach out to software maintainers if your idea touches existing tools, projects, or platforms. This helps align efforts, avoid duplications, and possibly even uncover opportunities for collaboration. If you need help identifying any software maintainers, you can contact the Engineering Working Group or the OSM Foundation Board, or ask directly on the announcement thread, so you can be put in contact with the correct parties.

Got questions? You can reply to the announcement thread, reach out to the jurors, or message the EWG directly. Jurors might also contact applicants during the review process if clarification is needed,so keep your inbox open.

We’re excited to see what you all come up with and submit! Whether it’s a tool to improve mapping workflows, enhancements to core OSM infrastructure, or entirely new ideas that fill a gap—we want to hear from you.

Submit your idea today and help shape the future of OpenStreetMap!

The OpenStreetMap Foundation is a not-for-profit organisation, formed to support the OpenStreetMap Project. It is dedicated to encouraging the growth, development and distribution of free geospatial data for anyone to use and share. The OpenStreetMap Foundation owns and maintains the infrastructure of the OpenStreetMap project, is financially supported by membership fees and donations, and organises the annual, international State of the Map conference. Our volunteer Working Groups and small core staff work to support the OpenStreetMap project. Join the OpenStreetMap Foundation for just £15 a year or for free if you are an active OpenStreetMap contributor

2 days ago

The twenty-fourth development diary marks the most significant milestone in OpenStreetMap-NG’s journey to date: the launch of our public test instance. After months of intensive development, we’re finally excited to show it all off! This isn’t just a technical achievement—it’s a pivotal moment in our mission to revolutionize open-source mapping.

🔖 You can read other development diaries here:
www.openstreetmap.org/user/NorthCrab/diary/

⭐ This project is open-source — join us today:
github.com/openstreetmap-ng/openstreetmap-ng

🛈 This initiative is not affiliated with the OpenStreetMap Foundation.

Public Test Instance Launch 🚀

• 🗺️ Public Instance (osm.ng)
• 📖 Testing Guide

OpenStreetMap-NG is now live for public testing at osm.ng. This milestone represents months of intensive development, optimization, and preparation to create a stable testing environment for the community. Every mapper, developer, and OpenStreetMap enthusiast can now experience what we’ve been envisioning as the next generation of mapping platforms.

The test environment runs completely independently from the main OpenStreetMap infrastructure. It features the complete OpenStreetMap dataset while providing a safe playground for experimentation and feedback. You can explore all the functionality without worrying about affecting live data—perfect for giving the platform a thorough evaluation.

Liftoff! We have a liftoff, 32 minutes past the hour. Liftoff on Apollo 11.

CloudFerro Infrastructure Partnership

We’re grateful to CloudFerro for generously sponsoring the server infrastructure that powers osm.ng. We deliberately chose a medium-specification server (30GB RAM, 4 CPU cores; they offered more) for a specific reason: to make performance bottlenecks and optimization opportunities clearly visible during testing. This strategic approach ensures that subtle bugs or inefficiencies don’t slip through due to overpowered hardware masking underlying issues. By testing on realistic hardware constraints, we can identify and resolve problems before they affect users more broadly.

Scalability Improvements

OpenStreetMap-NG now demonstrates exceptional scalability across diverse hardware configurations, thanks to extensive optimization work enabled by our test server access. The platform intelligently adapts to whatever resources are available, maximizing performance across different setups.

Memory scaling now works beautifully from 20GB RAM (the realistic minimum) all the way up to 128GB+ configurations. Processing adapts seamlessly from 4 CPU threads to 32+ core systems. Storage optimization handles everything from high-latency SSDs to directly-connected NVMe drives, dealing effectively with various bandwidth and latency conditions. This means OpenStreetMap-NG is accessible to organizations with modest infrastructure while still taking full advantage of powerful hardware when it’s available.

Dataset Loading Optimizations

Developer experience received a substantial boost through dramatic improvements in dataset loading performance. Initial local database pre-loading time dropped from 20 minutes to just 4 minutes—a remarkable 5x improvement while handling the same data volume! These kinds of optimizations remove friction from the development workflow, letting contributors iterate faster and experiment more freely with OpenStreetMap-NG’s hackable architecture.

Performance Engineering

The introduction of the speedup Python C extension revolutionizes performance-critical operations by implementing them in optimized C code. This delivers substantial performance improvements across multiple system components.

We’ve also significantly optimized memory usage through several architectural changes. XML parsing now uses 75% less RAM thanks to string interning and SAX-style parsing, eliminating memory pressure during replication processing on our test server. Database objects were completely reimagined by removing SQLAlchemy abstraction layers in favor of pure Python dictionaries with TypedDict typing safety. This makes the entire platform more efficient across all operations.

Features and Stability

The public test launch includes several user-facing improvements that really enhance the experience. Dark mode support provides comfortable viewing in low-light conditions, while the new language selector improves accessibility for non-logged-in users across different locales. We’ve also implemented comprehensive stability improvements addressing various bugs identified during development.

Before going public, we ran a two-week intensive testing phase with our Discord community members. This helped ensure stability and catch critical issues before the public announcement—having that extra set of eyes made all the difference.

What Caused the 6-Month Delay?

We know many of you have been waiting patiently, and we want to be transparent about why this took six months. The delay reflects the genuine complexity of optimizing OpenStreetMap-NG for production-scale deployment. Scalability turned out to be the primary technical challenge, requiring careful architectural decisions to balance performance with resource constraints.

Memory management proved particularly tricky. We needed to find optimal allocation strategies for large datasets while maximizing efficiency on limited hardware. Each architectural change required extensive validation with full datasets, and sometimes the smallest modifications could produce week-long delays. The iterative optimization process was time-consuming, but it resulted in a fundamentally more robust platform that we’re confident can handle real-world deployment scenarios.

Earn Rewards 🎁

We’re launching something new: a bounty program to recognize valuable community contributions during the testing phase. We’re offering $5 for quality feedback that leads to improvements, limited to the first 100 qualifying testers. The top 10 most valuable contributions will get an additional $5 bonus, bringing their total reward to $10.

We’re especially interested in reproducible bug reports, performance issues, visual glitches, accessibility problems, and security concerns. But general usability feedback, feature improvement suggestions, and API compatibility issues for developers are also incredibly valuable.

Learn more about the bounty program.

The Future

With the test instance fully operational, OpenStreetMap-NG enters an exciting new phase focused on community feedback and refinement. The hackable system design philosophy we’ve built in enables rapid experimentation and component swapping, encouraging innovative approaches to mapping platform challenges.

We’re committed to integrating community feedback—incorporating tester suggestions and bug reports into ongoing development. We’ll also be monitoring performance closely, analyzing usage patterns to identify new optimization opportunities. This testing phase is more than just technical validation—it’s an opportunity for the OpenStreetMap community to help shape the platform’s future direction through hands-on experience and constructive feedback.

🌠 Sponsors

We are incredibly fortunate to have individuals and organizations who support OpenStreetMap-NG through their generous contributions. Their commitment powers our mission to revolutionize open-source mapping and helps maintain the project’s independence.

Public supporters on Liberapay and GitHub Sponsors. You can click the image below to open it in a new tab. From there, you can click on the avatars to see their profiles.

♦

♦ ♦ ♦

3 days ago

Hallo,

ich konnte nichts finden und habe auch noch keine gute Idee wie man das hier mappt:

www.mapillary.com/app/?lat=53.099685400002016&lng=11.111625099998037&z=17&mapStyle=Mapillary+light&pKey=430649206064710&focus=photo

Wer kann helfen?

Netten Gruß bwbuz

4 days ago

OSM有多个含义，但最常见的是指“OpenStreetMap”，即“开放街道地图”。

OSM（开放街道地图）详解： ‌定义‌：一个由全球志愿者共同创建和维护的免费开源地图数据库项目。 ‌特性‌：数据可被任何人自由使用、编辑和共享，这与许多商业地图服务的限制性许可形成鲜明对比。 ‌数据来源‌：志愿者通过实地测绘、卫星图像分析、公共数据整合等方式贡献。 ‌应用场景‌：广泛应用于导航、地理信息系统（GIS）分析、研究、商业服务、应急救援、城市规划、交通规划、旅游、学术研究等多个领域。 此外，OSM还提供了丰富的API和各种工具，方便开发者将这些数据集成到各种应用程序中。

5 days ago

Working independently to help plot missing areas but conscious of the current geopolitical situation. Can anyone recommend if there’s any areas to be mapped out of urgency? For instance Texas with the current floods, Gaza or Ukraine etc for the humanitarian issues and destruction of war. I want my work to have as much positive impact and possible and consequentially don’t want to be plotting somewhere remote in say Africa for instance when actually somewhere else is in a much more urgent and desperate need. Many thanks.

5 days ago

ENGLISH

So, really it’s Gorgona Scalo (or something similiar) to La Spezia Migliarina (cuz of the tunnels, tunnels = no gps = no mapping)

Come with me in the train, (and map anything useful!)

www.mapillary.com/app/user/omfg_notpr?lat=43.74661276009806&lng=10.777098353365318&z=7.762409361009326&pKey=1257009309140080&focus=map&all_coverage=false

ITALIAN

Quindi, in realtà è da Gorgona Scalo (o qualcosa di simile) a La Spezia Migliarina (a causa delle gallerie, gallerie = no gps = no mapping).

Venite con me in treno, (e mappate tutto ciò che è utile!)

www.mapillary.com/app/user/omfg_notpr?lat=43.74661276009806&lng=10.777098353365318&z=7.762409361009326&pKey=1257009309140080&focus=map&all_coverage=false

GERMAN

Also, eigentlich geht es von Gorgona Scalo (oder so ähnlich) nach La Spezia Migliarina (wegen der Tunnel, Tunnel = kein GPS = keine Karte)

Komm mit mir in den Zug (und zeichne alles Nützliche ein!)

www.mapillary.com/app/user/omfg_notpr?lat=43.74661276009806&lng=10.777098353365318&z=7.762409361009326&pKey=1257009309140080&focus=map&all_coverage=false

TRANSLATE IN YOUR LANGUAGE!

by clicking here / this button, you can translate in your language

pss. pss.. deepl translator. not gugglu :)

6 days ago

개인적으로 참고하기 위해 작성한 항목입니다. (수시 업데이트)

도로

• enforcement 관계: 교통법규 단속 장비
• change 키: 차로 변경 가능 여부
• expressway 키: 고속화도로 여부
• motorroad 키: 자동차전용도로 여부

8 days ago

INSCRIÇÕES LIVRES E ABERTAS PARA O III WORKSHOP MAPEAMENTO PARTICIPATIVO E CARTOGRAFIA SOCIAL - MPCS 2025

— Read in English

Você já pode se inscrever para o maior evento de mapeamento coletivo de 2025. Agradecemos a participação de todos que enviaram as suas contribuições! Nos veremos em agosto, no evento 100% online e completamente aberto ao público. Inscrições em: ivides.org/workshopmpcs2025

Números do evento até o momento:

• 133 palestrantes
• 36 Projetos na Mostra de mapeamento
• 20 Apresentações de capítulos do livro
• 9 Palestras especiais com especialistas convidados
• 1 Oficina de OpenStreetMap + 01 Mapatona
• 1 Lançamento de livro [90 autores(a) e 20 capítulos]

♦

♦

8 days ago

• Complete Notes
• Finish inputting bus routes
• Finish the inside of the MUB
• Colors, heights, and 3D models of the buildings
• Stoke / Paul College area needs love

a day ago

Who am I ?

I have been retired since 2020 after a long career in networking and IT security.

Since then, I’ve spent my time walking (nothing too ambitious: no mountains, but still around 2,000 km per year) and doing math (a lifelong hobby, mainly algebra focused on functional equations).

I discovered OSM very recently (spring 2025) when switching from Windows to Linux MINT and trying out my first smartphone with LineageOS (a de-Googled Android).

what follows is of course only my personal opinion

At first, I thought it was just a freely editable map application, before realizing that it is in fact:

• a global geospatial database with open contributions, listing and exposing only data that is free of rights, under the most permissive licenses possible.

• a vast open-source application ecosystem leveraging this geospatial database for a wide variety of uses:

  • to contribute or make smart, efficient, even fun use of it.

    • Tools I’ve looked at and used: Id, JOSM, OsmTracker, Osmose, StreetComplete, taginfo, overpass, panoramax, NSI
    • Tools I’ve only skimmed so far: MapRoulette, Mon Commerce OSM, Libre Charge Map, H.O.T.

  • to use the database for various purposes aimed at diverse audiences:

    • The one that led me to OSM: OsmAnd, then leaflet and uMap
    • Also cartes.app, and a bunch of hiking and cycling apps that I’ve only briefly glimpsed.
• and of course, a set of proprietary applications built on the OSM database (not always with proper attribution, by the way)

So I created an account, joined OpenStreetMapFrance (not mandatory), and tried to understand enough of the principles, limitations, and recommendations to contribute effectively.

I’m now a regular reader of the WIKI and the forum (even though I sometimes struggle to follow whole conversations – such as those about hiking route relations, linear or networked…).

I quickly switched from Id to JOSM and realized that there are (at least) two worlds in contributing:

• personal/local contributions where everyone can improve the map of their surroundings (StreetComplete is a great example for tag improvements, but there’s also adding facilities not yet in OSM, recent road changes, etc.). These contributions are rewarding and motivating but are limited by the number of contributors in the field. These limitations can be addressed through challenges (I haven’t participated or created any, but the concept seems exciting).

• bulk contributions which involve starting from an available data source and injecting processed results into OSM. Naturally, there are several constraints here:

  • the source must be acceptable, in particular:

    • it must be licensed compatibly with OSM (open and allowing redistribution under OSM’s license). I learned this (a fundamental concept) thanks to forum answers to my questions about extracting usable data from mainstream apps.
    • it should be “reasonably” reliable
    • ideally, it should have sustainable updates (getting a one-time licensed file has limited long-term value)
  • the data processing must be secure and reliable enough (duplicate detection, tag conflict detection between the open data source and local contributor tags – which can be more reliable unless the contributor tags imprecisely)
  • the processing must be “doable”. Anyone is technically free to do bulk edits if they have the CPU and bandwidth. But there are recommended practices (e.g., declare the project on the WIKI, check if major contributors are already working on it, abandoned it, or would hand it off for known reasons…)

Scaling up personal contributions is obviously possible:

• by engaging many contributors (e.g., in a challenge), each ensuring the reliability of their data (field verification)

• by “putting to work” a large number of remote contributors (for instance, mapping road networks in Sub-Saharan Africa by having contributors each analyze small chunks of aerial or satellite imagery. In such cases, I wonder if good AI pre-processing could significantly accelerate the work)

to be continued

I’ve greatly appreciated the forum’s support in helping me understand and move forward, though I sometimes found the gap between forum/Wiki info frustrating.

I’ve discovered some things on my own from these various sources (which is to be expected), and I think I’ll try to write a few small texts about what I’ve learned. I don’t think the forum is the right place for that (it would feel a bit like clutter), and even less the WIKI (which seems more exhaustive and precise than pedagogical – aside from the many tutorials, of course).

I’ll try to see if my user diary could be used for that:

• pros: it’s a personal space, reflecting only my views, and doesn’t interfere with the roles of the forum or the WIKI

• cons: I get the impression user diaries are almost completely hidden:

  • it took me three months to discover they even exist
  • I haven’t found any search engine for user diaries, which severely limits their usefulness for this purpose
  • I didn’t immediately understand that there’s a separate user profile for the OSM France forum and for OSM itself, and the user diary is accessed through the latter

… But maybe I’ll never write those diary entries!

Souhaite-tu aussi une version simplifiée ou plus “native” du texte en anglais, par exemple pour un usage public ou collaboratif ?

a day ago

peta

2 days ago

test

2 days ago

♦

Kex Gill (humorously named the “Côte de Blubberhouses” for a stage of the 2014 Tour de France) is a road in Yorkshire between Harrogate and Skipton. Part of it is gradually sliding down the valley that it is built half-way up the side of and is being rebuilt; it was the access tags on bridleways there that caught my eye in the first place.

What next seemed odd was that there seemed to be no locality for Kex Gill itself, despite it appearing an seemingly every radio traffic bulletin locally for many years. It turns out that there is just this natural=moor and this misnamed area of heathland (I say “misnamed” because there’s really one area of heathland and three localities, there’s no one name with two slashes in it). The heath area appears as expected, but the node doesn’t appear prominently on one of my maps even though I was treating the (deprecated in OSM for vagueness) natural=moor tag as just a place=locality, because we’ve no idea how big it is, and small things only appear at high zooms.

So, why not add the “exact area” of the locality of Kex Gill Moor to OSM? Bluntly, localities such as this don’t have fixed boundaries. Any fixed boundaries that I made up would be wrong because of the “TIFD problem”. A node it will therefore have to remain, but how can we store “how much area does this represent”?

A glance at the imagery and at current-ish OSM-compatible maps from the OS (OS OpenData StreetView and OS OpenMap Local can give us an idea of the actual size - it’s about 6 square kilometers, and that is usually expressed in OSM by the sqkm tag (yes, the wikifiddlers have deprecated that too - but it’s potentially really useful, as we’ll see below).

I added that rough sqkm value to Kex Gill Moor a couple of days ago and changed the vector extract code to use that to decide what vector zoom level it gets written at and also to map that through as a corresponding “way_area” value (so that vector zoom levels >= 14, which all use tiles at zoom level 14, can also work). The result - success!

So what does this have to do with the Pacific Ocean? Well, there are actually a lot of things that don’t really have precise borders and OSM isn’t good at representing them. Take the North Sea as an example - if we believe that relation, the North Sea gets closer to Scotland and Denmark than it does to Norway, despite the country boundaries of all three being similar. Another major problem with trying to maintain “exact” areas for this sort of thing is that they break easily - something that matches a physical feature is easy to verify, but one that is literally invented for OSM is not.

Both of these problems have contributed to the Pacific Ocean being mapped as a place=ocean node (and the North Pacific and South Pacific as place=sea nodes). The Pacific Ocean also has a sqkm value too, so (as per the example above) it’d be easy for someone to use the mechanism above to create a map that shows it to address the issue in this forum thread.

2 days ago

OpenStreetMap went viral! Well, sort of.

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A recent Instagram video highlighted an area where Pokémon Go had better trail coverage than Google Maps. You can see for yourself:

Original Instagram Post

OSM Town Mastodon Mirror

Currently, the video has over 12.6 million views and 733 thousand likes!

As you probably know, Pokémon Go uses OSM for its map data. So it’s cool seeing it acknowledged that OSM data performed better, even if it was misguided as a compliment towards Pokémon Go/Niantic.

With a little bit of searching, I found the path that they were on: Way #518694188. Added 8 years ago by BikeRoad.

4 days ago

-3.423250

4 days ago

Καλησπέρα σε όλους/όλες,

Ως μέλος της ελληνικής κοινότητας του OpenStreetMap, θα ήθελα να σας προσκαλέσω σε συνάντηση της κοινότητας, πρωτίστως διαδικτυακή και μετέπειτα από κοντά, ώστε να γνωριστούμε καλύτερα και να συζητήσουμε διάφορα σχετικά με το OSM.

Για την διαδικτυακή συνάντηση:

🗓️Ημερομηνία και ώρα: Τετάρτη 16 Ιουλίου, 20:00
🔗Σύνδεσμος δωματίου συνάντησης: BigBlueButton

Το BigBlueButton, για όσους δεν ξέρουν, είναι το λογισμικό συναντήσεων που χρησιμοποιεί το OSMF. Για την σύνδεση στο δωμάτιο, αρκεί να βάλετε το όνομα σας, δεν είναι απαραίτητη κάποια εγγραφή.

🗓️🔗Σύνδεσμος συνάντησης στο OpenStreetMap Calendar: osmcal.org/event/3894/

Δεν υπάρχει συγκεκριμένη ατζέντα για το τι θα συζητήσουμε, γι’ αυτό γίνεται αυτή η αρχή για κάνουμε μια πρώτη γνωριμία, να δούμε τι θέματα υπάρχουν σαν ελληνική κοινότητα στο OpenStreetMap, και μια γενική συζήτηση για διάφορα περί OSM.

Θα συζητήσουμε επίσης για τα τελικά της δια ζώσης συνάντησης στην Αθήνα, η οποία λογικά θα γίνει Σάββατο 26 Ιουλίου, 3 το μεσημέρι, στο Piu Verde στο Άλσος Παπάγου. Θα βγει νέα δημοσίευση όταν οριστικοποιηθούν οι λεπτομέρειες.

Δείτε την αντίστοιχη δημοσίευση στο φόρουμ, όπου θα δημοσιεύονται οι κύριες πληροφορίες: community.openstreetmap.org/t/topic/132512

Για επικοινωνία με τα υπόλοιπα μέλη της ελληνικής κοινότητας, πέραν του φόρουμ, για πιο άμεση επικοινωνία στο τσατ Element.

Σας ευχαριστώ και ελπίζω να ιδωθούμε,
jimkats

5 days ago

مرحبًا بكم في مؤسسة راشد للنظارات، وجهتكم الأولى للبصريات في مدينة الرياض. نقدم لكم مزيجاً من الخبرة والابتكار في عالم العناية البصرية:

• 👓 نظارات طبية وشمسية بأحدث الموديلات
• 🔬 فحص نظر متقدم بأجهزة دقيقة
• 🧑‍⚕️ استشارات من خبراء مختصين
• 🚗 سهولة الوصول ومواقف مخصصة للعملا

5 days ago

Vom 2. bis 3. Juli fand in Salzburg die jährliche AGIT-Konferenz für Geoinformatik statt. Unter dem Motto „Shaping Geospatial Futures“ versammelten sich mehrere hundert Besucherinnen und Besucher aus dem deutschsprachigen und internationalen Raum. Auch wenn ich nicht jedes Jahr dabei war, zeigt ein Blick in meine Unterlagen: Mein erster Beitrag auf der AGIT (ein Poster) stammt aus dem Jahr 2005. Ein 20-jähriges Jubiläum also? Verrückt, wie die Zeit vergeht. In diesem Jahr hatte ich die Gelegenheit, die Ergebnisse der Masterarbeit von Pauline Radu zu präsentieren. Im Wintersemester hatte sie sich im Rahmen ihrer Abschlussarbeit mit Daten des Landeskriminalamts Rheinland-Pfalz beschäftigt. Mit dem Titel ihrer Arbeit: „Möglichkeiten und Potenziale von Retrieval-Augmented Generation für die räumliche Analyse von Kriminalitätsdaten“ konnte somit ein hochaktuelles und praxisnahes Thema in Salzburg gezeigt werden.

Anbei ein Auszug aus der Publikation ihrer Arbeit: “Die steigende Komplexität und Sensitivität der Kriminalitätsanalyse erfordert innovative Ansätze, um präzise Einblicke zu gewährleisten. Dieser Beitrag untersucht das Potenzial der Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) für die Analyse von Kriminalitätsdaten unter besonderer Berücksichtigung deutschsprachiger Texte. RAG integriert fortschrittliche Natural Language Processing (NLP) Techniken mit Retrieval-Modulen, um kontextreiche Antworten auf spezifische Fragen zu generieren. Anhand eines prototypischen RAG-Systems, implementiert mit polizeilichen Falldaten aus Rheinland-Pfalz, werden Möglichkeiten und Herausforderungen für die räumliche Analyse untersucht. Ergebnisse zeigen, dass das System präzise in der Identifizierung von Tatort-Hotspots und der Analyse von Deliktmustern agiert, jedoch Herausforderungen in der Konsistenz und Abdeckung räumlich breiter Phänomene aufzeigt. Durch Feintuning und verbesserte Datenintegration könnte RAG zukünftig eine robuste Unterstützung für die Kriminalitätsanalyse bieten.” Der Fulltext des Beitrags ist unter folgender DOI zu finden: doi.org/10.25598/agit/2025-14

Ein kleines Augenzwinkern am Rande: Mein Vortrag begann mit dieser provokanten Folie – „RAG is dead. Long live agentic retrieval!?“ Mit dieser Aussage wollte ich auf die rasante Entwicklung im Bereich der KI-basierten Informationssysteme anspielen. Während RAG in vielen Anwendungen noch als innovativ gilt, wird in der Forschung bereits über den nächsten Schritt diskutiert: sogenannte „agentic retrieval“-Ansätze, bei denen autonome Agenten gezielt, adaptiv und kontextsensitiv Informationen beschaffen. Ob es sich dabei nur um ein Buzzword oder um den Beginn einer Paradigmenverschiebung handelt? Wir werden sehen ♦

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Vielen Dank an dieser Stelle für das positive Feedback und die Fragen im Anschluss und in den Kaffeepausen – hat mich wirklich gefreut.

7 days ago

FREE AND OPEN REGISTRATION FOR THE III WORKSHOP ON PARTICIPATORY MAPPING AND SOCIAL CARTOGRAPHY - MPCS 2025

— Ler em Português

You can now register for the collective mapping event of 2025. Thank you to everyone who sent their contributions! We’ll see you in August at the event, which is 100% online and completely open to the public. Registration at: ivides.org/workshopmpcs2025

The actual event numbers are:

• 133 speakers
• 36 Projects in the Mapping Exhibition
• 20 book chapter presentations
• 9 Special Keynotes with invited experts
• 1 OpenStreetMap training session + 01 Mapathon
• 1 book release [90 authors and 20 chapters]

To keep contact: ivides@ivides.org

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8 days ago

Tôi vừa hoàn thành một đợt cập nhật dữ liệu hành chính tỉnh Cao Bằng trên bản đồ OSM, dựa theo các nghị quyết chính thức của Quốc hội Việt Nam về việc sắp xếp lại các đơn vị hành chính cấp huyện và xã trong giai đoạn hiện đại.

🗂️ Tổng hợp quá trình sáp nhập: 2000–2019:

Tỉnh Cao Bằng duy trì 13 huyện và ~199 xã/phường/thị trấn.

Không có thay đổi lớn, chỉ có điều chỉnh nhỏ về địa giới hành chính, tên gọi.

2020:

Theo Nghị quyết 864/NQ-UBTVQH14 (10/01/2020):

Sáp nhập huyện Thông Nông vào huyện Hà Quảng

Giảm 38 xã, từ 199 còn 161 xã/phường/thị trấn

2025:

Theo Nghị quyết 1657/NQ-UBTVQH15 (16/06/2025) và Đề án 383/ĐA-CP (09/05/2025):

Tỉnh giảm còn 56 xã/phường (53 xã + 3 phường)

Các phường mới của TP Cao Bằng:

Thục Phán (gồm: Sông Hiến, Hợp Giang, Đề Thám, Hưng Đạo, Hoàng Tung)

Nùng Trí Cao (gồm: Ngọc Xuân, Vĩnh Quang, Sông Bằng)

Tân Giang (gồm: Tân Giang, Duyệt Trung, Hòa Chung, Chu Trinh, Lê Chung)

Nhiều xã mới được thành lập như: Quang Long, Nam Quang, Hưng Đạo, Yên Thổ, Sơn Lộ…

Từ 01/07/2025, mô hình chính quyền 2 cấp (tỉnh → xã/phường) chính thức áp dụng tại Cao Bằng.

Just completed an update of administrative boundaries for Cao Bang Province (Vietnam) in OpenStreetMap, based on official government resolutions about merging lower-level administrative units.

🗂️ Summary of the process: 2000–2019:

The province had 13 districts and ~199 communes/wards/townlets.

No major changes, only minor adjustments.

2020:

Under Resolution 864/NQ-UBTVQH14 (Jan 10, 2020):

Thong Nong District merged into Ha Quang District

Number of communes reduced from 199 to 161

2025:

Under Resolution 1657/NQ-UBTVQH15 (June 16, 2025) and Plan 383/DA-CP (May 9, 2025):

Province reorganized to just 56 communes/wards (53 communes + 3 wards)

New wards of Cao Bang City:

Thuc Phan (from Song Hien, Hop Giang, De Tham, Hung Dao, Hoang Tung)

Nung Tri Cao (from Ngoc Xuan, Vinh Quang, Song Bang)

Tan Giang (from Tan Giang, Duyet Trung, Hoa Chung, Chu Trinh, Le Chung)

New communes formed: Quang Long, Nam Quang, Hung Dao, Yen Tho, Son Lo, etc.

From July 1st, 2025, Cao Bang implements a 2-tier government model: province → commune/ward (no urban district level in the capital).

🔗 Nguồn / Sources: Nghị quyết 864/NQ-UBTVQH14 – 2020

Nghị quyết 1657/NQ-UBTVQH15 – 2025

Lễ công bố tại Cao Bằng – Nhân Dân 30/6/2025

8 days ago