Generally speaking, Lifecycle Prefixes mean that when something is no longer in use, a tag such as amenity gets changed to disused:amenity. That should be straightforward, but sometimes disused=yes creeps in.

This example overpass query for nwr["amenity"="fast_food"]["disused"="yes"]({{bbox}}) finds a couple of examples. In these cases we can have a look at the tag history and (as seen in the picture at the top) notice that the FHRS ID changed recently, and the disused=yes actually corresponded to the name of a different business on the same site (in fact that that one has the full set of such tags: ["amenity"="fast_food"], ["disused:amenity"="fast_food"] (which don’t make sense together) and ["disused"="yes"]. In these cases you can often look through the tag history and see what the current status is supposed to be; if the last changeset comment was “this has now closed” it’s fairly obvious.

So does disused=yes always mean that someone has forgotten to change something to a lifecycle prefixed version? Well, maybe not. As an example, what about this former quarry? It’s not used as a quarry any more, but it is still a very big hole in the ground, so it makes sense to show it as such. Maps that I create distinguish between operational quarries

and historical ones

so including disused=yes in the latter category was straightforward.

What else might disused-yes occur with?

Quite a lot of the landuses don’t need any change at all. For example landuse=brownfield; disused=yes is something that people have tagged, and landuse=grass; disused=yes is also around; it usually means that something else (perhaps no longer tagged!) is disused.

Hari Perempuan Internasional diperingati pada 8 Maret tiap tahunnya. Pada peringatan ini pula, banyak hal yang perlu direfleksikan terkait pemenuhan hak-hak perempuan dan kesetaraan gender. Salah satunya, apakah fasilitas umum di perkotaan sudah ramah manusia, khususnya perempuan?

Sejak Maret 2026, saya mengikuti kampanye Jalanin Aja Dulu (JAD) yang diselenggarakan oleh lakunakota di Cekungan Bandung. Pada kampanye tersebut, partisipan didorong untuk berjalan kaki sejauh 2,5 km setiap harinya untuk melatih budaya mobilitas dengan berjalan kaki. Saya memanfaatkan momen ini untuk memetakan dan menilai kondisi infrastruktur pejalan kaki yang saya lalui ke OpenStreetMap (OSM).

Metode

Pemetaan saya lakukan sambil berjalan kaki dengan pace antara 9’00” (berarti 9 menit per kilometer) hingga 20’00”, rentang pace yang ditetapkan dalam kampanye JAD. Saya menggunakan aplikasi StreetComplete untuk mendata banyak objek, seperti keberadaan trotoar, penerangan, menambahkan fasilitas umum, dan menambahkan catatan untuk hal-hal yang kompleks. Setelah itu, saya berusaha merapikan pemetaan yang saya lakukan sebelumnya menggunakan desktop iD Editor.

Saya biasanya berjalan kaki di sekitar Jalan Dago, Kota Bandung. Terkadang saya juga berjalan kaki di tempat lain yang familiar, seperti Kota Baru Parahyangan dan Jalan Buah Batu. Tak jarang pula saya memutuskan untuk berjalan kaki di tempat-tempat yang belum pernah saya lalui, seperti Baros di Cimahi atau gang-gang sempit di tengah Kota Bandung untuk mendapatkan sensasi tersendiri. Selain itu, sebagian sesi berjalan kaki saya lakukan antara pukul 6 sore hingga 12 malam, menambah relevansi data yang saya dapat dengan ruang aman perempuan di jalan.

Keberadaan trotoar

Trotoar di OpenStreetMap dapat dipetakan menjadi satu dengan jalan utamanya maupun secara terpisah. Menurut OpenStreetMap Wiki, trotoar sebaiknya dipetakan sebagai Way (sebutan untuk fitur garis di OSM) yang terpisah. Hal ini dilakukan supaya routing untuk pejalan kaki lebih akurat. Meskipun demikian, saya menganggap trotoar dapat dipetakan menjadi satu dengan jalan utamanya apabila jalan yang dimaksud berupa jalan sempit, gang, atau tempat di mana trotoar nyaris tidak berfungsi sebagaimana mestinya.

Secara umum, trotoar di OSM yang dipetakan terpisah menggunakan tag sebagai berikut:

highway=footway
footway=sidewalk

Sementara itu, tag di bawah dapat disematkan ke jalan utama yang didukung oleh keberadaan trotoar:

sidewalk:left=yes/no/separate
sidewalk:right=yes/no/separate

isian yes/no/separate tergantung pada apakah trotoar ada, tidak ada, ataupun dipetakan sebagai way yang terpisah.

Dalam aplikasi StreetComplete, fitur Way hanya dapat diubah propertinya, sementara penambahan atau perubahan geometri tidak dapat dilakukan. Untuk memetakan trotoar yang ada di samping jalan, pengguna aplikasi dapat memilih kelompok “Pavement” yang ada di kanan atas layar. Kemudian, pengguna dapat menekan jalan yang ingin ditambahkan informasi trotoar untuk tiap sisinya. Terdapat tiga pilihan, yakni:

1. pavement, klik ini jika terdapat trotoar di sisi jalan yang dimaksud
2. no pavement, klik ini jika tidak terdapat trotoar di sisi jalan yang dimaksud
3. pavement displayed separately on map, klik ini jika trotoar telah terpetakan sebagai Way terpisah.

StreetComplete akan secara otomatis menambahkan tag sidewalk:left atau sidewalk:right setelah pengguna menambahkan informasi tersebut. Apabila trotoar dirasa lebih cocok untuk dipetakan terpisah, tetapi belum ada Way terpisah, saya biasanya menambahkan catatan di titik tersebut lalu menambahkannya melalui iD editor.

Untuk kasus jalanan di Cekungan Bandung, trotoar yang fungsional umumnya hanya ditemui di pusat kota saja, seperti Jalan Dago, Riau, Asia Afrika. Padahal, daerah suburban (misalnya Bojongsoang, Cisangkan, dan Cileunyi) juga sangat membutuhkan trotoar. Masyarakat yang ingin berangkat beraktivitas dari permukiman menuju perhentian bus harus berjalan kaki beriringan dengan kendaraan bermotor. Hal ini tentu saya berbahaya, baik dari segi keselamatan maupun keamanan. Harapan saya, data keberadaan dan ketiadaan trotoar ini dapat berguna bagi pengguna data OSM dalam bernavigasi dan pemangku kepentingan dalam merencanakan infrastruktur.

Pencahayaan

Aspek pencahayaan juga tak dapat dikesampingkan jika membicarakan ruang aman bagi perempuan di fasilitas umum. Trotoar dan jalan yang tidak memiliki pencahayaan dapat membahayakan ketika ada lubang maupun manhole yang dibiarkan terbuka. Selain itu, pejalan kaki juga rawan tidak terlihat oleh kendaraan bermotor yang jalurnya berpotongan dengan trotoar. Jalan dan trotoar yang dilengkapi dengan penerangan juga dapat mengurangi potensi kejahatan, meskipun tidak selalu.

OSM mampu menyimpan informasi pencahayaan di jalan dan trotoar dengan tag:

lit=(yes)/(no)/(24/7)/(automatic)

Pada aplikasi StreetComplete, pengguna dapat memilih apakah suatu jalan atau trotoar dilengkapi dengan pencahayaan. Terdapat empat opsi, yakni iya, tidak, diterangi hanya ketika dilewati orang, atau diterangi selama 24 jam. Ketika pengguna memilih salah satunya, StreetComplete akan secara otomatis menambahkan tag lit=* ke objek Way.

Penyeberangan jalan

Terdapat banyak sekali karakteristik sebuah penyeberangan yang dapat dipetakan melalui StreetComplete. Pengguna aplikasi dapat secara langsung menambahkan:

1. Keberadaan marka dalam sebuah penyeberangan
2. Keberadaan “crossing island” di antara dua jalur kendaraan
3. Keberadaan aspek lampu lalu lintas yang mengindikasikan izin bagi penyeberang jalan untuk menyeberang
4. Keberadaan tombol untuk mengatur aspek lampu lalu lintas
5. Keberadaan alarm untuk mengindikasikan adanya penyeberang jalan
6. Keberadaan pemandu untuk penyeberang jalan tunanetra
7. Kelandaian jalur penyeberangan terhadap trotoar di kedua ujungnya

Informasi-informasi ini tidak hanya berguna bagi perempuan, melainkan berguna pula bagi penyandang disabilitas, lansia, ibu hamil, dan kaum rentan lainnya.

Point-of-interest lainnya

StreetComplete juga memungkinkan pengguna yang melakukan survei langsung di lapangan untuk menambahkan tempat atau objek. Terpetakannya point-of-interest dapat membantu pengguna jalan dalam menemukan patokan-patokan tempat yang dilalui. Dengan demikian, pengguna jalan dapat menentukan potensi risiko maupun tempat-tempat yang dapat disinggahi ketika dalam kondisi di luar rencana.

Selain tempat penting untuk navigasi, POI penting yang dapat membantu mobilitas masyarakat, antara lain bangku, titik-titik penerangan jalan umum, ATM, minimarket, dan toilet umum. Keberadaan tempat-tempat lainnya, restoran, kafe, dan sekolah juga secara tidak langsung berperan dalam memudahkan perencanaan perjalanan masyarakat. Misalnya, jika diketahui bahwa tempat yang dituju tidak memiliki trotoar atau penerangan yang baik, seseorang dapat merencanakan kembali rencananya demi mempertimbangkan keamanan dan keselamatannya.

Selain menambahkan maupun mengubah objek, aktivitas berjalan kaki yang saya lakukan juga membantu “mapper” lainnya di OSM. Dalam kampanye JAD, digunakan Strava untuk menyimpan jejak aktivitas berjalan kaki. Hal ini otomatis terunggah ke sistem “Strava Heatmap” yang membantu kontributor OSM dalam menentukan keberadaan dan geometri jalan.

Penutup

Hingga diary ini ditulis, saya telah berjalan setidaknya 120 km di wilayah Cekungan Bandung dalam kampanye JAD. Berdasarkan pengamatan langsung yang saya unggah ke OSM, menurut saya kondisi fasilitas umum di Cekungan Bandung masih jauh dari kata “inklusif”. Inklusif dalam artian mampu digunakan dengan baik oleh semua golongan masyarakat, termasuk perempuan. Kondisi trotoar yang sekadar ada dan sebagian besar tidak dilengkapi pencahayaan serta fasilitas penyeberangan banyak yang tidak memiliki aspek lampu lalu lintas tentunya masih membahayakan.

Welcome to my first entry in OSM.

I have been quite interested in being here every once in a while, it actually helps the fact that there’s a map that needs constant updating and can actually do something.

So far, from what I’ve done within my local city of London, Ontario, I finished up:

1. New Plaza at Fanshawe/Highbury
2. Bus routes
3. Road classification
4. Fixing of OSM notes
5. Coveted new developments at the South and West sides of the city.

Im not surprised that theres alot more for me as an individual to explore, nothing much and thats just all.

Silos. Map ‘em. As many as you can. Lovely round, tall silos. Almost never singular. Search for them in farmyards, along railroads. Bonus points for mapping the elevator, truck scales, other assorted buildings and even adding operator.

I love OSM being first. So I went straight out to take GPS trace of new roundabout on our town’s bypass, almost as soon as bypass re-opened.

Probably need to go back and do a bit more work on the exits, but at least it is there!

osm.org/changeset/182400633

Today marks three years since I joined the OpenStreetMap community in May 2023. I am posting this diary entry at the exact time I published my first changeset, which I still remember clearly for its simple message: “add more data.”

It’s a straightforward phrase, but over these three years, it’s really shaped my journey as a mapper. What began as a tiny contribution has blossomed into a deep commitment to mapping my area in as much detail as possible.

Main Objectives

Right now, I’m focused on two main goals for our region:

• Power Grid: I’m mapping every single power line in Tulcea County, from the high voltage transmission lines to the medium and low voltage lines which provide power to every town and village.

• Improving Every Town: Besides the infrastructure, I aim to enhance the data for every town in Tulcea County. This involves cleaning up geometry, adding missing POIs, and making sure the map accurately reflects our local communities.

Once I’ve improved every town in Tulcea County and wrapped up the power grid, I intend to shift from regional to national efforts. My aim is to take what I’ve learned here in Tulcea and apply it to bigger projects all over Romania.

There’s a lot to tackle, but as I’ve realized over these three years, the best way to map a country is one node at a time. The upcoming changesets will make OpenStreetMap one of the most accurate maps of Tulcea, providing a level of detail that other commercial map services simply cannot match. I can’t wait to see the map evolve even further.

Today in our OpenStreetMap interview series we speak with Volker Krause about Transitous, a community-driven, open platform for public transport routing. We explore the challenges of relying on proprietary transit APIs, the importance of open data for mobility, and how projects like Transitous are pushing the boundaries of what’s possible with OpenStreetMap and collaborative infrastructure.

1. Can you introduce yourself, your involvement with OpenStreetMap, and what first got you interested in open mapping?

I’m Volker, contributing to Free Software for more than two decades, mostly in the KDE community. As part of the work on the travel app “Itinerary”, I started using OpenStreetMap data, initially for indoor map rendering and indoor routing, especially in train stations. That’s also how I ended up as part of the team that started Transitous two years ago.

2. What is Transitous, and what motivated you to build it? What problem are you trying to solve with it?

The primary source for public transport routing for Free Software applications prior to Transitous were the proprietary APIs of public transport operators and agencies. Usage of those was tolerated at best, the APIs had to be reverse engineered and could change or even disappear entirely at any time.

That’s not an ideal foundation to build applications on, so we wanted something better. Transitous is a public transport routing service built entirely on Free Software and Open Data. It’s run by the community as shared infrastructure for free applications needing access to realtime public transport data.

3. Why does it matter to build open, shared public transport routing infrastructure instead of relying on proprietary platforms?

What’s even worse than the technical limitation mentioned above is that these proprietary APIs only cover the regions an operator is active in, and only their own services. While understandable from their perspective, as a traveler I don’t want to have to manually find the right operators for the regions I’m traveling in, and to query multiple sources to get the full picture of all available options.

Transitous doesn’t care about regional nor operator boundaries, on the contrary.

Having no conflicting interests also allows us to look into things that are unlikely to be provided in proprietary services. One such example is transfer routing for wheelchair users, taking into account the realtime operation status of elevators. These kinds of features usually only appear in proprietary services in response to regulatory pressure.

Another example is ongoing work for taking empirical delay information into account, something that is also very unlikely to be done by operators trying to advertise their own services.

We’ll only get things like these if we as a community build them ourselves, and Transitous is a platform on which we can do this.

4. Where does OpenStreetMap data work well for routing today, and where does it still fall short, especially for pedestrians and public transport use cases?

The OpenStreetMap data generally works very well for routing, and the fact we just have to work with one single integrated planet-wide dataset alone is a massive help.

For routing transfers inside e.g. train stations there’s some aspects where improving the mapping would help though.

In multi-floor stations we heavily rely on the “level” tag. Its use and maintenance varies a lot across different countries. Also, none of the standard views on the OSM website visualize it in any way yet, which isn’t helping with this either.

When considering accessibility in routing it’s mostly about the level of detail. Technically it’s not a big difference whether you route for a pedestrian or a wheelchair user, but for the latter the result becomes useless if we miss just a single step somewhere. So every such barrier has to be mapped for this to work reliably.

5. What are the main technical and data integration challenges in building a cross-border public transport routing system using OpenStreetMap and open transit data?

For the public transport schedule data we don’t have the luxury of a single integrated dataset. There we are currently integrating more than 3000 data feeds. Those need to be properly aligned so overlaps don’t result in duplicates, and normalized so that you get consistent results everywhere.

Part of that is also realtime data that updates once a minute, and that continuously needs to be matched to the static baseline data. Given the rapid update frequency, this has to work fully automatic, without human review or intervention.

6. What could the OpenStreetMap and open mobility communities do to better support projects like Transitous?

While there’s of course always details in the data that could be improved, the collaboration with the OSM community works great.

Public transport operators actually providing their data (which at least in the EU is legally required), doing so with a decent quality, and being responsive to feedback to issues we find would help a lot though. How well that is done varies greatly unfortunately.

7. OpenStreetMap recently celebrated 20 years. Where do you see the project in another 20 years?

I’m sure OSM will still be around and be more relevant than ever. I find it very hard to predict how things will evolve though.

For example: Just three years ago a community-run public transport routing service with even just national-wide coverage was considered technically impossible with realistically available resources. Two years ago the assumption was that the best we could do is stop-to-stop routing in a handful of European countries. Recently our test server has demonstrated door-to-door routing from Berlin to Tokyo. Something that might seem infeasible today might just get implemented tomorrow.

One area in the vicinity of OSM that I’d like to see progress in and that today is still dominated by a few proprietary vendors is dynamic traffic data, i.e. anything from temporary road closures to traffic flow data. I hope we’ll have all that liberated as well eventually, maybe even a bit earlier than in 20 years.

Transitous demonstrates the power of open data and community collaboration in solving complex mobility challenges, from cross-border routing to accessibility-aware navigation. As Volker notes, the future of open mobility will depend on how communities continue to build and expand these shared systems.

A big thank you to Volker Krause for sharing his insights.

Danielle

Please let us know if your community would like to be part of our interview series here on our blog. If you are or know of someone we should interview, please get in touch, we’re always looking to promote people doing interesting things with open geo data.

Removed Plateau Peak Trail. During SAR search (Dec 30) it was discovered the trail was no longer visible on the ground. Parallel trail still visible and provided access to Plateau Peak as verified by GPS.

So here are my experiences in installing Panoramax instance OSM-HR. I’ve made this from notes taken at a time, so hopefully I did not miss too much. Let me know if I did.

There are several ways to install, and I’ve decided to go with docker compose, and with regular OSM Oauth2 login.

We bumped into few issues during the deployment, but we reported them at appropriate repos, and they were fixed so nobody should be bothered by them anymore. Please do the same if you bump into some of your own!

So mostly I followed official instructions here: https://docs.panoramax.fr/backend/install/tutorials/running_docker_osm_auth/

with some preparation first as outlined in: https://forum.geocommuns.fr/t/deploying-a-panoramax-instance-the-pre-flight-check-list/1892

and info about storage needs: https://forum.geocommuns.fr/t/storage-needs-for-a-panoramax-instance/3205

Hardware

First actual hard step was getting the appropriate hardware and place to host it; see that pre-flight check list for other things like checking the law etc.

http://openit.hr/ kindly donated the hardware, and https://carnet.hr/ the place and Internet to host it. Much thanks to them!

We got quite a beast: 4U Super-Micro cse-847 server with 2 * Xeon E5-2680v2 (40 CPU threads @ 2.80GHz), 256 GB DDR3 RAM, 2x1TB SATA SSD, and 34x3TB SAS HDD (54 TB of usable HDD space after RAID6 partitioning), Nvidia Tesla P4

You can get with (much) lower specs, depending on your needs. But we have a good-hearted sponsor so yay!

Creating Oauth2 app

So firstly, I went to osm.org/, logged in, clicked on menu / “My account” / “Oauth 2 Applications” / “Register new application” and created Oauth2 application as described on: https://docs.panoramax.fr/backend/install/tutorials/running_docker_osm_auth/#creating-our-osm-oauth2-client

“Name” was set to Panoramax HR and “Redirect URIs” to https://panoramax.osm-hr.org/api/auth/redirect

Make sure to write down “Client ID” and “Client Secret”, as you’ll need them later and this is only time you’ll be able to see them.

Preparing the host OS

We use Debian. Originally at a time we tried going with Debian Bookworm GNU/Linux, but that had complained about Docker Compose configs, so we upgraded to Trixie. As it is Debian Stable at this moment, that is what I’d recommend anyway nowadays.

We also decided to use multiple HW RAID6 pools, LVM and EXT4, due to familiarity and stability and experience in recovering them (hopefully this won’t jinx it). Some people go with XFS instead of EXT4, and others swear by ZFS and replace both LVM and EXT4 with it – but I’ve never got too familiar with it (due to the way back in bad old days there were licensing issues with it. Never checked if that was resolved. Ha). And we decided on Docker Compose in order to hopefully have easy upgrades and keep host OS to pure Debian “main” packages.

So, we installed prerequisite packages, created a logical volume and formatted it.

apt install docker.io docker-compose docker-cli curl nginx certbot python3-certbot-nginx

lvcreate --name panoramax-pics --size 40T shrikehdd
mkfs.ext4 -T largefile /dev/shrikehdd/panoramax-pics
mkdir /osm/panoramax/storage
echo "/dev/shrikehdd/panoramax-pics   /osm/panoramax/storage    ext4    defaults        0       3" >> /etc/fstab
mount /osm/panoramax/storage
mkdir /osm/panoramax/storage/pics
chmod 1777 /osm/panoramax/storage/pics

Note that our Debian root directory (and thus, where docker SQL database will live) is on SSD.

Getting and configuring Panoramax

We fetch it from git and copied template config file:

git clone https://gitlab.com/panoramax/server/api.git panoramax-api
# git checkout develop # only if you like to live on the edge -- we had to at a time, as we were finding some bugs on the way
cd panoramax-api/docker/full-osm-auth/
cp -ai env.example .env

and then we edited that .env to configure for our instance:

INSTANCE_NAME=OSM-HR
FLASK_SESSION_COOKIE_DOMAIN=panoramax.osm-hr.org
PICTURES_DIR=/osm/panoramax/storage/pics/
INFRA_NB_PROXIES=2

• we also set the long (different) passwords for FLASK_SECRET_KEY and PG_PASSWORD. You can use output of python3 -c 'import secrets; print(secrets.token_hex()) to generate appropriately long passwords.
• and we set OAUTH_CLIENT_ID and OAUTH_CLIENT_SECRET to those values we’ve written down when when we created Oauth2 app in previous steps.

Also, we needed to edit docker-compose.yml from that panoramax-api/docker/full-osm-auth/ directory and update API_SUMMARY according to docs at https://panoramax.ign.fr/api/configuration We did this:

   API_SUMMARY: >-
     {
      "color": "#ff0000",
      "description": {"en": "OpenStreetMap Croatia", "hr": "OpenStreetMap Hrvatska"},
      "logo": "https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/w/images/6/6d/Logo_Croatia.svg",
      "email": "panoramax@osm-hr.org",
      "name": {"en": "${INSTANCE_NAME:-A Panoramax instance}", "hr": "${INSTANCE_NAME:-Panoramax instanca}"},
      "geo_coverage": {"en": "Croatia and ex-YU region", "hr": "Hrvatska i regija"}
     }

Starting up Panoramax

We went to panoramax-api/docker/full-osm-auth/ directory and started Docker Compose with docker compose --project-name panoramax-hr up --pull=always -d

That should pull up everything newest and start Panoramax in background.

You should verify here if it works by calling curl --fail http://localhost:8080/api - it should return some JSON.

Publishing it to the world

We’ve picked nginx. Since panoramax.osm-hr.org was setup in DNS to point to our server, we created /etc/nginx/sites-available/panoramax with following content:

  server {
        listen 80;
        listen [::]:80;

        server_name panoramax.osm-hr.org;

        # Limit the files that can be sent to 100M
        client_max_body_size  100M;

        # buffer size when receiving big files. 6M should be enough for most pictures, but feel free to tune this value depending of your needs.
        client_body_buffer_size 6M;

        client_body_timeout     120s;
        send_timeout            60s;
        proxy_read_timeout      120s;
        proxy_send_timeout      120s;

        location / {
            proxy_pass http://localhost:8080;
            proxy_set_header Host $host;
            proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
            proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
            proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Host $host;
            proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
        }
  }

And then enabled it and started it:

ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/panoramax /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/
service nginx reload

(note we don’t use systemd as I deem it a horrible idea; but service(8) on Debian should run regardless if you’re using SysVinit or Systemd)

Then we fetch free Let’s Encrypt TLS certificates by running certbot --nginx and choosing out panoramax.osm-hr.org server from the list.

That makes people able to open https://panoramax.osm-hr.org/ and login and look and upload there!

Geo-limiting the uploads

While the hardware we got was very powerful, we knew it wasn’t nowhere near infinite, so we couldn’t host the whole world. And cameras get better (and more Mpx) with time, and disk usage only rises.

Still, it felt a shame to limit it only to Croatia (where the server and sponsors are from), so we decided to allow all countries from ex-Yugoslavia to use it. (not only we have great mapper friends there, but laws and language are similar, so there is also that).

To restrict what areas are allowed, we first had to get .geojson of the area (see https://docs.panoramax.fr/backend/install/deep_dive/excluded_areas for the info) and save it as exyu.geojson

Then we used docker compose -p panoramax-hr exec api /home/geovisio/.local/bin/panoramax_backend default-account-tokens get to get a Bearer token (looong string of letters and numbers and few dots)

And then we uploaded that config:

  curl -X PUT "https://panoramax.osm-hr.org/api/configuration/excluded_areas?invert=true"\
       -H "Authorization: Bearer xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.the.rest.ofthe.bearer.token.xxxxxxxx" \
       -H "Content-Type: application/geo+json"     --data-binary "@exyu.geojson"

(of course you replace bearer token with that string you got earlier)

Testing

Then there was testing. Obviously, easiest was to use our new web at https://panoramax.osm-hr.org/ to try to upload pictures from both allowed and disallowed regions, to see if geo-limiting was working.

Then we tried some sequences uploading from CLI (sudo apt install pipx; pipx install panormax_cli), using the mobile apps (Vespucci custom server) etc.

We first had test instance on different hardware that we nuked later and setup production, but that is not needed. (If you do something similar, make sure to nuke your panoramax-cli config cache, or it will behave strangely).

Announcing to the world

Well, when you’re happy that everything is working great, you want to make your instance usable by others too!

• Firstly you need to make it a part of federation so it will be visible in meta-catalog on https://api.panoramax.xyz/ You just need to open a simple issue like this: https://gitlab.com/panoramax/server/meta-catalog/-/work_items/56

• While web and panoramax_cli will work automatically for uploads by just specifying the new instance, and Vespucci will pick instance from meta-catalog above automatically; we also quite like Baba mobile app for uploads - but they have a hard-coded list of servers. Opening issue might’ve been enough, but we’ve created a full PR to make it easier and quicker for Baba developer: https://gitlab.com/ravenfeld/baba/-/merge_requests/390

• and of course publicize - on OSM blog, on Fediverse, on SotM-HR 2026 (see https://c.osm.org/t/konferencija-state-of-the-map-croatia-2026/143248/2 ), etc.

Appendix A: managing the Docker Compose

I’m not much of a docker guy, but here are some commands which seem to work for me and might come handy to you:

# startup in the future with fetching new versions if needed:
docker compose -p panoramax-hr up --pull=always -d

# shutdown with:
docker compose -p panoramax-hr down

# check logs:
docker compose -p panoramax-hr logs -f --tail 1000

# process list:
docker compose -p panoramax-hr ps

# DESTROY everything docker-related -- in case you mucked it up completely and want to start from scratch:
docker compose -p panoramax-hr down --volumes --rmi all --remove-orphans
docker system prune -a --volumes

# database access
docker compose -p panoramax-hr exec -it db psql postgres://gvs:thatlongPostgresqlPassword@db/geovisio

TODO

• try to setup our own blurring server (it was in initial plan, but there were issues with that blurring docker container, and we had deadlines to mean - SotM-HR 2026; where I presented Panoramax)
• backups (Database. And pictures. And hardware to store ‘em, uhhhh)
• move Croatian (and other ex-YU) pictures off the OSM-FR server to our OSM-HR, to help reduce their overload (see https://c.osm.org/t/osm-fr-panoramax-server-only-for-testing-if-outside-of-france/143428/2) once stable UUIDs are implemented
• encourage more users to setup their Panoramax instances – this can only work for whole world if there are a lot of us!
• admin user over the web (not just CLI Bearer - see https://docs.panoramax.fr/backend/install/cli/#set-the-role-of-an-account )
• figuring out how to check out blur / unblur requests and other moderation / flow checking
• look into few warnings / errors in the logs (and file some more issues)

this is very intriguing I will try to keep up to date.

When I first arrived at DTU, I was surprised to discover that the map quality was largely inferior to the one back in my home country, France, and was lacking a lot of details, the most crucial being emergency-related appliances and infrastructure.

I would have expected a leading engineering university to have correct, if not excellent, mapping across its campuses, but seemingly that is not the case. I was a bit disappointed because if Denmark values inclusive design a lot, at least on paper, there is very little activity to make these accessible infrastructures easily reachable by their main targets. I guess full support for these features might also be lacking across the variety of apps using OSM data (without considering that these apps are not used by the majority of people), but yeah, a bit of a disappointment here.

So I randomly started mapping around DTU campus, sometimes raising awareness among people around me, sometimes being told to “get a life” (jokingly), but in my opinion, volunteering for something collaborative, be it a charity or an online collaborative map, adds a lot of value to one’s life. You don’t do things for yourself only. Okay, it might be a bit addictive at some point, and you might make changes that are so niche that no one cares besides yourself, but hey, the whole point of collaborative initiatives is also to embrace individual particularities, not to merge them into a bland and vague thing. By looking at the map in different places, you can notice tiny subtleties and tiny additions that show people cared. Even 11 years ago, people cared. Who knows, maybe this contributor passed away since then? Nevertheless, their work is still there and will continue to be refined further. And that is truly beautiful, in my opinion.

That’s all for today. See you later, maybe! 💚

~ Louis

Making the Map of India Even More Accurate! 🇮🇳📍

I am proud to share that I have successfully completed 100% of TomTom’s project: “India – POIs Located Not on Buildings.”

The primary objective of this project was to correct Points of Interest (POIs) that were not situated within the accurate footprints of buildings. An accurate map not only enhances navigation but is also absolutely essential for emergency services and local businesses.

Project Highlights:

Mission: Data Improvements

Total Contribution: Successfully fixed 631 out of 734 tasks.

Status: 100% Complete.

It has been a fantastic experience collaborating with the OpenStreetMap (OSM) community to make the map even more reliable.

Mapping isn’t just about finding routes; it’s about helping the world. 🌍📍

I am proud to contribute as a volunteer with United Nations Mappers. I recently achieved Level 5 (Off the Charts). This journey is not merely about statistics, but about reaching out to the communities that need assistance the most.

My Mapping So Far:

Total Swipes: 562+ (For data accuracy)

Total Area: 87 sq. km (Mapped territory)

Projects: Contributed to 9 humanitarian missions

Supported Entities: 2 major organizations

As a volunteer, every swipe I make and every kilometer I map helps facilitate relief operations during times of crisis. 💪

Alright, after successfully updating the boundaries in Bali, now, I’m shifting my focus further east across the Lombok Strait. Next stop: Lombok Island.

For those who don’t know, Lombok is a gem in the Lesser Sunda Islands, famous for the Mandalika International Circuit and its world-class surf breaks. It’s a new major tourist hub that definitely deserves some love on the map. I’ve already spent some time mapping the natural=* and landuse=* in the smaller islands.

Baiklah, setelah berhasil mengupdate batas wilayah di Bali, kini saya alihkan fokus saya ke arah timur melintasi Selat Lombok. Selanjutnya: Pulau Lombok.

Bagi yang belum tahu, Lombok adalah permata di Kepulauan Sunda Kecil, terkenal dengan Sirkuit Internasional Mandalika dan ombak selancar kelas dunia. Wilayah ini bisa jadi pusat wisata baru yang layak mendapat perhatian di peta. Sebelumnya, saya telah memetakan natural=* dan landuse=* di pulau-pulau kecilnya.

Hi all, if anyone is attending the World Urban Forum in Baku, Azerbaijan and wants to organise an OSM / open mappy meetup with me, please reach out or comment on this diary :)

https://wuf.unhabitat.org/wuf13

Hi everyone,

I’m currently using the Valhalla API for routing, and I recently started experiencing some issues (e.g., slow responses / failed requests / unexpected results).

The issue occurred on May 4th at around 5:15 PM (Egypt time, UTC+2).

I wanted to check if there is any ongoing outage or known issue with the service at that time.

If anyone else faced similar behavior or has any insights, I’d really appreciate your help.

Thanks in advance!

Os alunos da Escola Secundária Jerónimo Emiliano de Andrade (https://esjea.edu.azores.gov.pt/), dos cursos de Técnico de Serviços Jurídicos e Técnico de Ação Educativa 1, decidiram que a melhor maneira de comemorar os 50 anos de Autonomia da Região Autónoma dos Açores era criar uma viagem por alguns dos lugares que contribuíram e contribuem para uma autonomia cada vez mais forte. Assim nasceu este mapa: (https://umap.openstreetmap.fr/pt-pt/map/viagem-pelos-lugares-da-autonomia-acoriana_1394943#5/50.750359/-0.219727)…

Editora IVIDES has produced two volumes containing the translation of the FPOSM’s ODbL License booklet

Download EN VERSION

The original work Tout savoir sur la license ODbL : la licence d’OpenStreetMap pour cartographier en commun was written in French in 2024 and updated in 2026 by the Fédération des Pros d’OSM, a French organization that brings together various companies and professionals working with open data, OpenStreetMap, and related software. The authors of the original booklet are: François Lacombe (Datactivist), Florian Lainez (Jungle Bus), Antoine Riche (Carto’Cité) and Christophe Biez (Latitude-Cartagène Cartographies).

The English translation was prepared by Editora IVIDES and translated by Raquel Dezidério Souto (IVIDES DATA® and IVIDES.org®) and Modo Levo Engelbert Steve (OSM ENSTP and OSM Cameroun).

The work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 France (CC BY-SA 2.0 FR). Text of the license

Editora IVIDES produziu dois volumes com a tradução do livreto da FPOSM sobre a licença ODbL

Download VERSÃO PT

A obra original, Tout savoir sur la license ODbL : la licence d’OpenStreetMap pour cartographier en commun, foi escrita em francês em 2024 e atualizada em 2026, pela Fédération des Pros d’OSM, uma organização francesa que reúne diversas empresas e profissionais que trabalham com dados abertos, OpenStreetMap e programas relacionados. Os autores da obra original são: François Lacombe (Datactivist), Florian Lainez (Jungle Bus), Antoine Riche (Carto’Cité) e Christophe Biez (Latitude-Cartagène Cartographies).

A versão traduzida para o português do Brasil foi preparada pela Editora IVIDES e traduzida por Raquel Dezidério Souto (IVIDES DATA® e IVIDES.org®).

A obra tem licença Creative Commons - Attribution - Partage dans les mêmes conditions France 2.0 (CC BY-SA 2.0 FR). Texto da licença

Important note: IVIDES.org® and OpenStreetMap® are registered trademarks.

Every three years introvert communities from three Baltic countries try to gather together in one city and discuss things they’ve been doing. It is called SotM Baltics, and this year the conference comes again to Riga, Latvia. It’s in less than a month: 4th of June!

We’ve got just one day, and not a weekend even. But there will be many GIS professionals in neighbouring rooms (with their own conference), and generally the event will definitely feel like an oasis of open mapping.

I would like to invite you — whether you live nearby, or can fly in for a couple days — to attend and maybe present at the conference. There will be video recordings, and more importantly, a free lunch for everyone. And both the city and the weather promise to be splendid.

See the website for info and forms: https://2026.sotm-baltics.org/

For the next day I’m thinking of organizing either a workshop or a bicycle ride, whichever looks more fun.

Hello

1999 and tomorrow it’s 2000, deus volente, and HAL goes off the year after.

Today I did mapping in Baucau. I added some new roads and buildings that are not in OpenStreetMap. I am happy to be able to help the community get a better map.

Hello,

Below I have compiled recent news related to the OSM Foundation (OSMF) board’s work. Most of these are or are going to be publicly documented on the OSMF website, so if you follow the Atom feed for the board meetings’ page, you can skip this.

What this diary entry is

It contains my personal selection and recollection of recent OSMF board-related updates.

What this diary entry is not

It is not intended to include details or all OSMF board-related updates. For these, you can refer to the published board minutes. This entry has not been reviewed by the OSMF board.

Why?

Informing the OSMF members is important. The board minutes describe in detail what was discussed in public board meetings, but many people don’t have time or follow the Atom feed for the OSMF’s website recent changes. At some point, I was creating annual or more frequent updates for the whole Foundation, which was a lot of work during a short period, while other tasks were ongoing.

I’m posting this experimentally, and I’m going to see whether I can continue to do so semi-regularly.

2026 OSMF budget

The 2026 budget of the OSM Foundation is now published. You can find previous budgets here. Please note that the board may revise the budget throughout the year.

April 2026 OSMF board updates

The board had a meeting on Thursday, 30 April 2026.

You can read the Secretary’s report by Dani Waltersdorfer and the Treasurer’s report by Roland Olbricht.

OSMF’s move to the EU

Craig Allan (Chair) committed to informing the community about the status of the OSMF’s move to the EU, after a comment by Simon Poole (former OSMF and LWG chair) during the April board meeting.

OSM Local Chapters and regional communities

OSM US Inc: The OSM US and OSMF Boards had a closed, introductory meeting on 2026-04-09. The OSMF board, after a comment by imagico (guest) during the April board meeting, said that it is open to meeting with other OSM Local Chapters, if they are interested.

OSM France: Apologies were expressed again to OSM France during the April board meeting (previous apology on February 2026), as the board did not inform them about the communications with the French Cadastre.

Presentations during OSMF board meetings: The board wants to restart presentations by Local Chapters and communities during board meetings (previous presentations). If you are interested, please email the board at the address mentioned here.

OSMF Corporate Members

Héctor Ochoa Ortiz (Deputy Secretary) had a private meeting with TomTom (Corporate Member) to discuss their intention to share information with the OSM community regarding their detection of potential vandalism and problematic edits. Héctor pointed them to the Data Working Group. rphyrin (guest) suggested that OSMF (and TomTom) could facilitate a community discussion to address this issue together.

Financial

2026 fundraising drive: The board will hold a closed chat on 2026-05-07 to discuss fundraising communications for the proposed 2026 fundraising drive.

BTC: The board decided to use Monetum as a service to exchange Bitcoin donations to fiat. The OSMF’s BTC address is this one.

OSMF bank accounts: The Treasurer has already regained access to the main Bank of Ireland account and is working to regain access to the Fire EU account.

Contract extensions: The board extended the contracts of Martin Raifer’s (iD maintainer) and myself (assistant to the OSMF board).

Operations

QGIS tile server load: On average, QGIS users access more OSMF tiles daily than users of osm.org. Some OSMF people are in contact with the QGIS board. Suggestions include upgrading the QGIS Corporate Membership to Platinum, or buying OSMF a server dedicated to their traffic.

State of the Map (SotM) 2026

The board decided to finance the travel of the three Sovereign Tech Fund contractors to attend the State of the Map (SotM) 2026 conference.

Board members’ participation at external meetings

2026-04-20: Dani Waltersdorfer Jimenez (Secretary) was invited by the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, and on 2026-04-20 gave a presentation and participated in discussions during the Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS) National Transportation Atlas Database (NTAD) meeting of experts.

2026-05-01: Héctor Ochoa Ortiz attended the 2026 Geospatial World Forum and participated in the GKI Summit 2026-05-01 panel discussion “Scaling GKI: Public–Private Partnerships and Cross-Agency Delivery Models”. Héctor mentioned that there were discussions about bot usage/scraping at the conference and that he might post a diary entry. OSMF was offered a free ticket to participate.

2026-06-19: Héctor Ochoa Ortiz, together with Yannick Brosseau (OSM community member in Canada), will facilitate an OSM online mapathon organised by Gore Mutual (Canada) for their employees. The company will offer a €1,450 honorarium to OSMF.

2026 Board face-to-face (F2F) meeting in June

Six of the seven board members will meet in person in Madrid at TomTom’s office, from 6 to 7 June 2026. Unfortunately, Brazil Singh will not be able to attend. The meeting will be facilitated by Aspiration Tech.

The current OSM Foundation board members are:
Brazil Singh 🇧🇩
Craig Allan 🇿🇦
Daniela Waltersdorfer 🇵🇪
Héctor Ochoa Ortiz 🇪🇸
Laura Mugeha 🇰🇪
Maurizio Napolitano 🇮🇹 and
Roland Olbricht 🇩🇪.

Read their biographies and find out their officer and other roles.

OSMF board members are volunteers.

Minutes of public OSMF board meetings are on the OSMF website.

I would also like to take this opportunity to thank the weeklyOSM volunteers, including those who attend the OSMF public board meetings, as well as the community members who submit news to the weekly :)

在画地图时，我们往往离不开一个很重要的地标——祠堂。我先假设各位朋友们都明白祠堂对于一个村庄或一个镇街，在地理上与历史文化上的重要意义，因此就跳过解释（如果你需要了解它，这里是维基百科的链接）。总而言之，它的重要程度足以在OSM上拥有一个标记。不过，寻找一个适合它的tag，却成为了一个难题。

参考现有的例子

我先参考了OSM上，中港台三地现有的祠堂，以及它们的tag。

amenity=place_of_worship

例子有：宗祠 Ancestral Hall、劉氏家祠 Lau’s Ancestral Hall、五福堂 Ancestral Hall、宗祠、朱厝宗祠、鄭氏祠堂、祠堂、祠。

landuse=religious

例子有：扬氏宗祠、隴西堂(彭氏祠堂)、余氏宗祠、邱氏宗祠-明德堂、谢氏大宗祠。

religion=chinese_folk

例子有：劉氏家祠 Lau’s Ancestral Hall、宗祠、余氏宗祠、扬氏宗祠。

amenity=community_centre

例子有：宗祠、宗祠。

结论

从我收集到的例子来看，OSM上对祠堂的标注，多数为amenity=place_of_worship以及landuse=religious，而部分祠堂会附带religion=chinese_folk的key。这些标注初看是挺合适的，但是仔细揣摩，我发觉这并不完全准确。

这些标注更适合宗教场所。而祠堂，在文化意义上是供奉和祭祀祖先的场所，而祖先崇拜并非为一种宗教。至于religion=chinese_folk，它通常指的是中国民间信仰。虽然有些民间信仰会与祖先崇拜混合，有些祠堂会举行民间信仰的崇拜活动，但这并不代表着所有祠堂内举行的活动都有带有民间宗教信仰的成分。

有部分祠堂的标注为amenity=community_centre，这其实也反应了祠堂的另一些功能：宗族成员的聚集活动场所，比如节庆宴饮、婚丧寿喜，等等。

祠堂在OSM上难以寻找到一个合适的tag，其实就体现了一种文化上的差异——OSM来自英国，大部分OSM贡献者也来自欧美地区。它的tag和key的设置，就是默认以欧美地区的文化为基础的。而对于中港台等东亚文化地区的地图绘制，那些普适性的，比如交通设施、商业建筑、住宅、学校、公园等等，往往没有什么问题。但是当我们要标注东亚文化圈内特有的文化现象——比如祠堂——问题就出现了。

我会希望我们能够自定义一个tag，比如amenity=ancestral_hall之类的，这样的标注，会比使用多个模棱两可的标注，准确得多。

现有的解决办法：building=shrine？

我翻查了OSM Wiki，找到了building=shrine这一个tag。根据OSM Wiki对它的定义，这似乎就是目前为止最适合祠堂的tag了。

说在最后

我没有想到，对于祠堂的tag的探寻，会成为一个跨文化语境下的迷你研究。此外，我在OSM Wiki上，有找到对于牌坊的标注，感觉很有意思：

man_made=ceremonial_gate
ceremonial_gate=paifang

牌坊能够拥有一个专属的标签，祠堂，是否也能拥有呢？