Because this question comes up again and again, I would like to document the answer here in a little more detail.

A garden house that was added two months ago to the OSM database is not displayed on a map at certain zoom levels, even though the underlying map data should actually be up to date. In my example, the problem was reported both in the GitHub repository of the map and in the GitHub repository of the German map style.

However, the map at karte.openstreetmap.de requests the tiles in exactly the same way as any other map that uses tiles from tile.openstreetmap.de: it retrieves them from the tile server tile.openstreetmap.de.

So, if you can rule out problems such as a local browser or map cache, troubleshooting continues at tile.openstreetmap.de.

New OpenStreetMap data should ideally become visible on tile.openstreetmap.de within a few minutes. After all, one of the most important tasks of the German tile servers is to show OpenStreetMap contributors as quickly as possible whether their changes have correctly arrived in the database.

This happens in two steps.

Keeping OSM data up to date

Database

The databases of the German tile servers are continuously updated via osm2pgsql using the latest OpenStreetMap data.

The current state of the database update can be seen directly below the map.

The displayed time is UTC. In Germany, this means that during daylight saving time the displayed time is two hours behind local time, and during standard time it is one hour behind.

It is also worth knowing that, for redundancy reasons, two servers are behind tile.openstreetmap.de. Currently these are Cassini and Bonne. The website indicates in its heading which server you have reached.

This is important when troubleshooting: a problem can occur on only one of the two servers while everything is already displayed correctly on the other. This can be particularly confusing.

Prerendering

Even if the database is up to date, this does not necessarily mean that every map tile being served contains the latest data.

The reason is so-called prerendering: map tiles are not rendered from scratch every time they are requested. Once a tile has been rendered, it is reused until a database update determines that it needs to be rendered again because of a change.

An outdated tile is not deleted immediately. Instead, it is marked as dirty.

When a tile is marked as “dirty,” a technically very simple but efficient trick takes place: the system does not delete the tile; instead, it changed its age on the server’s filesystem. When a tile is generated normally, the server stores it with the current timestamp. A tile marked as dirty, however, suddenly has the file date January 1, 1970, while remaining in the same directory. When a user scrolls to exactly this region in the browser, the following happens:

[Browser requests tile]
         │
         ▼
[mod_tile checks file]
         │
         ├──► Is the file date newer than the last DB update? ──► [Serve immediately]
         │
         └──► Is the file date older (e.g. Jan. 1, 1970)? ──────► [Tile is DIRTY!]
                                                                           │
                                                                           ▼
                                                             [Send render command to Tirex]

This has an important advantage: if the servers are heavily loaded, they can continue to serve existing, even if potentially outdated, tiles.

This keeps the map display as performant as possible even under heavy server load and avoids unnecessary blank areas.

For most users, this is a sensible compromise. Sometimes, however, a mapper needs to see the current state of a particular location immediately.

Requesting new OpenStreetMap.de tiles

When I read the issue linked above, I therefore looked at the affected location directly on both tile servers:

• bonne.openstreetmap.de

• cassini.openstreetmap.de

The shed was not visible on cassini:

On bonne, however, it was already visible:

This is not ideal. As described above, however, it is a deliberate compromise. If the servers are heavily loaded, not every change can be rendered immediately on every server. Otherwise, significantly more computing resources would be required, or one would have to accept that the map becomes slower more frequently or that areas that have not yet been rendered appear as blank areas.

Sometimes, however, a mapper needs to see the current state of a particular location. To do this, they can request more infos of the corresponding tile via the context menu on tile.openstreetmap.de.

Update tile

When viewing a particular tile on tile.openstreetmap.de, you can open a context menu with the right mouse button. It provides an option to retrieve further information about the tile.

Clicking Kachelinfos shows detailed information about the tile:

The tile on Cassini was rendered in May:

https://cassini.openstreetmap.de/19/275933/172159.png/status: Tile is clean. Last rendered at Mon May 11 14:10:07 2026. Last accessed at Fri Oct 02 18:14:45 2026. Stored in file:///var/cache/tirex/tiles/osmde/19/66/58/80/215/136.meta (Dates might not be accurate. Rendering time might be reset to an old date for tile expiry. Access times might not be updated on all file systems).

The tile is therefore indeed still based on an old data set.

The behavior (Do not regenerate it immediately if the server is under heavy load. ) can also be understood from the source code of mod_tile.

Conclusion

On the German OpenStreetMap tile servers, mappers have the option of requesting infos for a specific tile.

The OpenStreetMap data is continuously imported into the database.

Changes invalidate the affected tiles and mark them as dirty.

When the servers are heavily loaded, older, already existing tiles continue to be served.

So if a change is not yet visible, this does not necessarily mean that the OpenStreetMap data has not yet been updated or that there is another problem. It may simply be that the server is currently busy.

German see https://astrid-guenther.de/digitaleKartenAktualisieren/

007 Group

007 Group Chakwal is a private, non-profit youth organization and friendship brotherhood group based in the Chakwal district of Punjab, Pakistan

Read More About : 007 Group

Bhubhar is a rural village located in the Chakwal District of Punjab, Pakistan

• District: Chakwal, Punjab, Pakistan • Postal Code: 48800 • Nearby Towns: Mulhal Mughlan, Dharuggi Rajgan, and Dhudial • Local Demographics: Home to communities of Jutt’s , Awans , Kahouts and Rajputs

Bhubhar Chakwal

Some of the best things that happen in the OpenStreetMap community are small: micro-mapping contributions from around the world, a Saturday mapping party, an editathon to improve OSM Wiki, or a hackathon to fix issues on some of the tools that we use. Most of them run on volunteer time and can occasionally stall for the need of a venue, or a few hours of internet. When we asked at the 2026 Local Chapters and Communities Congress what makes it hard to sustain a local community, the most common answer was time and money.

The Local Chapters and Communities Working Group is launching the 2026 Community Microgrants to help with that. We have set aside a total of €5000 that will be distributed to various OpenStreetMap communities in grants of up to €500. Applications are open from 5 October to 25 October.

These are deliberately small grants for small, concrete activities like a mapathon, a one-day field mapping project, a validation sprint, a workshop with a local school or university group, or documentation translation. We’re less likely to fund conference travel, salaries, paid mapping, or recurring costs. Please review the full microgrant guidelines on the OSM Wiki.

Applying is quick. Go to the Microgrants wiki page, type a short project name into the input box under “Start an application”, and you’ll get a page ready to fill in that includes your budget. Grants are up to €500, but we request that you only ask for what your activity actually costs. Most won’t need the full amount, and the smaller the requests, the more communities we can support. These grants are for groups rather than individuals: local OSM communities, Local Chapters, YouthMappers chapters, and similar. We recommend discussing plans with your community first to avoid having multiple applications from the same group.

If you can’t edit the wiki, email your application to local@osmfoundation.org before the deadline and we’ll post it for you!

We’ll announce the results in the first week of November, and funded activities can run from mid-November 2026 to March 2027. Questions are welcome on the Discourse thread or at local@osmfoundation.org.

Header image (left to right, top to bottom): Mapbeks mapping party in Metro Manila, Philippines (2019, public domain); field mapping in Dakar, Senegal (2014, public domain); mapping party in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil (2014, Raylton P. Sousa, CC BY-SA 3.0); school mapping party in Giengen, Baden-Württemberg, Germany (2015, Klaus-Dieter Keller, CC BY-SA 4.0).

This post reminds me: I really need to get on tagging which sidewalk sections are too narrow for wheelchairs, or would be wide enough except for the telephone poles stuck in them. Curb ramps at either end only tell part of the story.

Tagging wheelchair=no on a separately mapped sidewalk is obvious.

A while back, I tagged a particularly bad downhill section on a street where the sidewalk had been mapped as part of the road, and I hadn’t gotten on my “map ALL the sidewalks!” kick yet. IIRC I asked on one of the forums and we came up with sidewalk:both:wheelchair=no (and left/right equivalents). I’ve since remapped that one separately.

I’m not sure what I should do about tagging really steep sections. There’s one block I always used to avoid when taking the kid out in his stroller (when he was small enough for that) because I was terrified of losing my grip and chasing him down the hill into the cross-street at the bottom.

I could use incline tags, but they’re typically up, down, or a percentage. I guess I could try to calculate the angles? 🤷‍♂️ #

000

000

I learned about https://streetcomplete.app/ recently and decided to give it a try. I resolved a bunch of quests in the area around my favorite library and in Old Town Pasadena. Not sure I did it all correctly, but it was a fun and engaging way to get into contributing to OpenStreetMap.

24/09/2026-30/09/2026

About us

• We’re excited to announce that weeklyOSM is now accessible via news.osm.org, honouring the voices and contributions of our global community equally. The new domain redirects to weeklyOSM.eu.

Mapping campaigns

• Eugene Alvin Villar announced the #31DayOSMChallenge proposed by the OpenStreetMap Foundation’s Local Chapters and Communities Working Group. See the Daily Challenges and note that you don’t have to contribute every day.

Community

• Raquel Dezidério Souto wrote, in her OSM User Diary, that she has edited two new volumes of the book Case Studies in Collaborative and Participatory Mapping (one of which is a thematic dossier on risk and disaster reduction). She authored chapters on the application of OpenStreetMap in two case studies conducted in collaboration with the Brazilian Ministry of Integration and Regional Development (part of volume 2). In total, 35 chapters were published, and the two e-books are available as open access on the Editora IVIDES portal.

• In Episode 284 of the Libre à Vous podcast, Anne L’Hôte presented a segment titled ‘complete your street’.

• In a blog post Christoph Hormann reflected on the challenges of communication within open-source communities such as OpenStreetMap. He highlighted how language barriers, differing cultural backgrounds, and the peculiarities of digital text-based communication can lead to misunderstandings in discussions, and calls for greater understanding and thoughtfulness in these exchanges.

• Reddit user u/Legitimate-Weight768 is currently mapping their hometown in Marcílio Dias, Canoinhas, Santa Catarina, Brazil, and is asking on Reddit for tips on how to improve their mapping skills with OSM.

• The Wikimedia Ghana User Group has organised Wiki Loves Places 2026 in Ghana, aiming to collect at least 250 geotagged images of places, document 250 new place entities on Wikidata, and add or update 250 locations on OpenStreetMap.

• A local category for Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland) has been set up on the OSM Community forum.

• 9_tab has written about Planet Trails in Switzerland. How many are there on OSM? How detailed is the mapping? What scale do they use? Do they include Pluto? What else? Which trails may be missing?

OpenStreetMap Foundation

• Dorothea Kazazi announced that the OSMF board candidates’ manifestos and answers to the official questions, by Brian Sperlongano, are now available on the OSM Wiki.

• Christoph Hormann discussed the upcoming OSMF board election 2026, saying that having four candidates for four seats makes the election ‘meaningless’ and could seriously damage the board’s legitimacy as a democratically elected representation of OSMF members.

Local chapter news

• OpenStreetMap US has published its September 2026 newsletter.

• InsertUser tooted that UK-based OSM mappers were able to vote for the next UK quarterly project until 28 September.

Events

• The Centro Argentino de Cartografía (CAC) has posted a reminder on LinkedIn that the registration deadline for the 13th Congreso de la Ciencia Cartográfica, which is also the 4th Congreso Virtual Internacional, was 30 September 2026. The virtual congress will take place from 6 to 8 October 2026 and is being jointly organised by the CAC and the Argentine Instituto Geográfico Nacional.

• Alpha Amadou Diallo reported that the municipality of Pire Goureye, Senegal hosted a collaborative mapping training activity with OpenStreetMap on 26 and 27 September 2026.

Education

• Nelson Gonçalves published learning material introducing web mapping and uMap.

OSM research

• Thiago Kikuchi and others have developed ► an interactive uMap showing the physical environment of urban river basins in Northern Paraná, Brazil, combining publicly available data on contour lines, slopes, soil types, hydrography, water bodies, springs, and watershed boundaries.

Maps

• Mark Dimond used OSMnx to visualise which road in England carries the most buses.

• Martin has developed a map that shows which konbini is closest to you in Tokyo and which chain dominates each area, using OpenStreetMap data.

• NoEscapeMap has developed NoEscape 2.0, a web map that geocodes past cases of border-crossing attempts from Ukraine’s open court registry data, intended to help tourists and researchers analyse ► risks and avoid ► danger.

• Stamen Design reported that their partner Stadia Maps has updated the underlying data used in several of Stamen’s basemaps, focusing on an overhaul of water features, such as rivers, lakes, and coastlines.

• Map Amore showcased ‘The Arrogance of Space Mapping Tool’, a tool that shows how much space cars occupy in our cities.

• Ogmios has built World Wide Waterways: Flussdiagram.me, a website where waterways are rendered in 1D maps with additional metadata from OpenStreetMap and Wikidata.

OSM in action

• Sozialheld*innen has launched ► a11y-Score, a tool that makes accessibility in Germany visible and comparable through a score from 0 to 100 for federal states, 418 districts and independent cities, along with Germany as a whole, based on OpenStreetMap geodata.

• BoxThisLap reported on TerraDrive, a new open-source map generator that converts OpenStreetMap and elevation data into driveable 3D environments. Released under the MIT licence, the tool utilises OSM’s road geometry, lane details, intersections, and building footprints to recreate real-world road networks, which can then be exported as playable levels for the vehicle simulation game BeamNG.drive.

• Spino87 posted PizzaRank, a directory of 30,931 Italian pizzerias, a good 24,000 of which were sourced from OpenStreetMap, and also made the OSM portion available ► as a .CSV or .JSON file under the ODbL licence, as simple attribution is not sufficient for a derived database work. On the OSM Community forum he asked for advice on how to report any errors found in the process back to OSM; in discussions with Martin Koppenhöfer it emerged that the duplicates and incorrect municipality names were due to peculiarities of the osmium export tool or his own script, whilst the six pizzerias that have permanently closed should now be reported individually as notes. The data also revealed that the oven=wood_fired tag has hardly been used to date, which is why both suggested promoting it more actively via presets and a StreetComplete quest.

Open Data

• After twenty years of service, IGN France is replacing ► Geoportail with its new portal designed as a single point of access to maps and territorial geographic data. The goal is to make the map an accessible, open, and useful digital tool both for everyday use and for major decisions, whether you’re simply curious, a hiker, a local elected official, or a professional. It contains maps from IGN and its partners, aerial photographs, and various maps (cadastral, forests, historical, topographic, and routes, etc).

• Jake Low announced that Layercake, a distribution of OpenStreetMap data separated into thematic layers and converted into GeoParquet format, has a new website.

Software

• Tykayn showcased Qualiwiki, a web dashboard to compare the content coverage between the English and French versions of the OSM Wiki.

• The PapaMap shows the nearest changing table that parents can reach using OpenStreetMap data and is now available as an iPhone app, with an Android version currently in development.

• Tobias Zwick announced the first public beta of StreetComplete for iOS.

Programming

• HeiGIT introduced HeiSlime, a Python toolbox that uses OpenStreetMap context to select images useful for analysis before processing them with a computer vision model. The result is a smaller, more targeted image set that saves processing time.

• The OSMF sysadmins tooted that upgrading to Mapnik 4.3.2 lead to significant performance improvements for raster tile rendering. On top of that, there are technical improvements to OSM Carto by leijuv and nakaner. Detailed explanations can be found on GitHub. Another, as yet unmerged, pull request to OSM Carto promises more performant sorting of features.

• Sarah Hoffmann reported that Kai Johnson has improved the CPU usage metering per client on an Overpass server. The measurements are used to ban heavy users by IP address and/or application. She also noted that most of the bad traffic comes from poorly programmed speed camera apps.

• In two Habr articles, Sunspirit described how his desire to create his own walking route led to the development of the route planner putemer.ru. In a follow-up technical article he explained why he switched from live Overpass API queries to his own OSM database, built from Geofabrik extracts and including a PMTiles map set, and uses elevation data, road network counts, plus cache settings, and how easily plausible measurements can lead to false conclusions.

Releases

• Amanda McCann recently added several new features to WaterwayMap, including multilingual names and integration with Wikidata and Wikipedia.

• Michael Johnson released NodeODM 3.6.2 to match the latest OpenDroneMap 3.6.2 release.

Other “geo” things

• ^[1] The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution reported that Marie Tharp was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 2026. Using thousands of sonar readings from research vessels, Tharp and Bruce Heezen revealed a 40,000-mile underwater ridge girdling the globe, helping confirm plate tectonics and continental drift theory, which were controversial among geologists at the time. This work led Tharp to create the World Ocean Floor Map, published in 1977 by the Office of Naval Research and still widely used today. The Columbia Climate School has made an interactive guide to the ‘Heezen–Tharp World Ocean Floor Map’.

• Researchers at Tufts University, led by Farshid Vahedifard, have analysed more than 190 million satellite and ground measurement points along the US coastline and found that 71.5% of the areas are sinking by more than one millimetre per year. The Gulf Coast is sinking the most, with 92.6% of measurement points showing downward movement at a median rate of 2.5 millimetres per year. The study also overlaid the subsidence map with population and infrastructure data and found a disproportionate impact on disadvantaged communities.

• NATO is seeking to procure a global vector basemap compliant with STANAG 2592 NGIF to support web mapping, rapid mapping, geospatial analysis, routing, and geolocation services. The package will centre on vector data combining current Overture Maps data with vendor-furnished data and other open or purchaser-provided sources, alongside derived products such as raster and vector caches, routable networks, and geolocator files. The procurement has an estimated value of EUR 3.5 million and is expected to be awarded in February 2027.

• A Lithuanian musician and self-styled ‘mythographer’ has renamed ► a striking rock formation at the Predigtstuhl, near Bad Reichenhall, on Google Maps from ‘Teufelssattel’ to ‘Wächter der Alaunen’ (after an ancient Celtic tribe that fascinates him) whereas the historical name is documented as early as 1580 by Philipp Apian. The local historical society, led by town archivist Johannes Lang, subsequently contacted Google, as the responsible Bavarian surveying authority had omitted the name from its map solely for graphical reasons, but had not replaced it. It was only with the technical support of a computer scientist that the old name was successfully restored. Lang sees this as an example of the growing trend towards ’emotional historiography’. The BR Quer programme also reported this at 00:39.

• MapTheNet displays a map of websites. Domains are placed near other domains they are linked to, and scaled according to the number of weighted incoming links. You can search a domain and see how it is connected to others, for example weeklyosm.eu.

Upcoming Events

Country	Where	Venue	What	When
🇮🇳	Kottayam		Mapathon Pre-event SotM Kerala 2026	2026-10-01 - 2026-10-05
🇮🇹	Messina	Fablab Messina (via Croce Rossa 63, 98124 Messina)	Hackathon Wikimedia & OSM	2026-10-02 - 2026-10-04
🇩🇪	Essen	Linuxhotel Essen	FOSSGIS-OSM-Communitytreffen Nr. 26 im Linuxhotel	2026-10-02 - 2026-10-04
🇪🇸	Langreo	Casa de la Cultura “Escuelas Dorado”	GeoCamp 2026	2026-10-03
🇫🇷		Mairie de Laillé	OSM Mapping	2026-10-03
🇮🇳	नई दिल्ली	Jitsi Meet (online)	OSM India - Monthly Online Mapathon	2026-10-03
🇩🇪	Essen	Verkehrs- und Umweltzentrum	Essen OSM-Treffen	2026-10-03
🇮🇳	Chennai Corporation	Velachery, Chennai	Chennai GLUG Velachery OSM Mapping	2026-10-04
			TNEI Mapathon 2026	2026-10-05
🇹🇼	臺北市	MozSpace Taipei	OpenStreetMap x Wikidata Taipei #93	2026-10-05
🇨🇭	Bern	SBB Headquarter	Open Transport Community Conference 2026	2026-10-06 - 2026-10-09
🇬🇧	Sheffield	Rutland Arms	OSM Sheffield - Monthly Social	2026-10-06
🇪🇸	Madrid	Online	Mappy Hour OSM España	2026-10-06
🇦🇹	Salzburg	Bewohnerservice Elisabeth-Vorstadt	OSM-Treffpunkt	2026-10-06
🇩🇪	Braunschweig	Stratum 0	Braunschweiger Mappertreffen im Stratum 0 Hackerspace	2026-10-06
			Missing Maps London Mapathon Beginner Friendly (with Training) (Online) [eng]	2026-10-06
			iD Community Chat	2026-10-07
🇬🇭		Ghana	Everywhere She Maps workshop 2026	2026-10-07 - 2026-10-08
🇮🇹	Milano	Building 4, SRN 4.1.1 Politecnico di Milano	PoliMappers Maptedì	2026-10-07
🇸🇰	Žilina	Fakulta riadenia a informatiky UNIZA	Missing Maps mapathon Žilina #24	2026-10-07
🇧🇪	Liège	Barricade, Liège	Carto party OpenStreetMap Café Crypté Liège	2026-10-07
🇪🇸	Barcelona	Barcelona	Junta d’OpenStreetMap Català	2026-10-07
🇩🇪	Stuttgart	Forum 3 Café	Stuttgarter OpenStreetMap-Treffen	2026-10-07
th	กรุงเทพมหานคร	Brighton College Bangkok Mapathon	Missing Maps Mapathon (Beginner) - Bangkok, Thailand	2026-10-08
🇧🇪	Bruxelles - Brussel	Galerie Bortier	Brussels meetup - byebye Thierry & Joost	2026-10-08
🇩🇪	Bochum	Das Labor, Alleestraße 50, Bochum	OSM-Treffen Bochum	2026-10-08
🇩🇪	Berlin	Grosse Hamburger Strasse 37, 10115 Berlin	220. OSM-Stammtisch Berlin-Brandenburg	2026-10-09
🇨🇭	Bern	irgendwo im Breitsch, wird noch definiert	OSM-Znacht in Bern	2026-10-09
🇮🇹	Catania	Biblioteche Riunite Civica e A. Ursino Recupero	Modifichiamo Wiki e OSM insieme! - Catania	2026-10-10
🇫🇷	Angers	École Nationale Supérieure d’Arts et Métiers	OpenStreetMap, des cartes à la carte !	2026-10-10
🇩🇰	København	Cafe Bevar’s	OSMmapperCPH	2026-10-11
🇫🇷	Angers	École Nationale Supérieure d’Arts et Métiers	OpenStreetMap, des cartes à la carte !	2026-10-11
🇮🇳	New Delhi	East Delhi	OSM Delhi Mapping Party No.33 (East Zone)	2026-10-11
			Panoramax Nederland - Online Community Meeting #1	2026-10-12
			CartONG : Mapathons en ligne 2026-2027	2026-10-12
🇳🇱	Amsterdam	TomTom HQ	2026 Autumn Maptime	2026-10-12
🇩🇪	München	Echardinger Einkehr	Münchner OSM-Treffen	2026-10-13
🇩🇪	Hamburg	Voraussichtlich: “Variable”, Karolinenstraße 23	Hamburger Mappertreffen	2026-10-13
🇩🇪		temporärhaus	OSM-Stammtisch Ulm/Neu-Ulm	2026-10-13
🇬🇧		Canolfan Cefnfaes	🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 North Wales Mapathon Gogledd Cymru 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿	2026-10-14
🇪🇸	Barcelona	Barcelona	Assemblea d’OpenStreetMap Català	2026-10-14
🇧🇪	Bruxelles - Brussel	Tour & Taxis, Avenue du Port 86C - 1000 Brussels	FOSS4G Belgium	2026-10-15
			OSMF Engineering Working Group meeting	2026-10-16
🇦🇷	Pergamino	Hub de Innovación	Encuentro OSM Argentina 2026	2026-10-17
🇫🇷	Metz	Espace Arob@se - Metz	Atelier OpenStreetMap Metz	2026-10-17

This weeklyOSM was produced by MatthiasMatthias, Nakaner, PierZen, Raquel Dezidério Souto, Strubbl, Andrew Davidson, barefootstache, derFred.
We welcome link suggestions for the next issue via this form and look forward to your contributions.

I while ago, while I was looking at something else, I noticed that there was some fairly recent (June 2025) 360° street-level imagery in Mapillary along part of Chesham High Street, but most of the mapping there was from 10 or more years ago.

I came back to this yesterday, and set to work on improving the map. First I looked to improve the building outlines and used the Land Registry Index Polygons and Bing aerial imagery to align them properly. Then I used the Mapillary images to update the shops that were visible.

I also looked at the rest of the High street and tried to tidy things up as best I code, using FHODOT to add some shops/amenities and addresses, and adding missing address tags by interpolation. The Bing Streetside imagery of the street was very old (2017) but I used it in a few places to add missing shop names on objects that hadn’t been edited since before then.

I’ve also set up a page for Chesham in my Linear Maps tool, to make it easer to see the various POI objects and what details may be missing on them. There’s still a bit of arm-chair mapping to do here.

The whole High Street could really do with a full ground survey to check on the state of most of the shops. Maybe someone local will discover OpenStreetMap and be able to help here.

Je publie sur Tisseur de Voies, le site où je calcule des boucles vélo avec retour en train, une carte qui répond à une question simple : depuis ma ville, jusqu’où puis-je partir à vélo en prenant un seul train ?

On choisit une ville parmi 60 et une durée de train aller, de 0 à 4 heures. La carte montre en rose les véloroutes des boucles qu’on peut rejoindre, et en bleu les gares atteintes, plus foncées quand elles sont proches.

Ici, Paris avec une heure de train : 1 763 boucles, contre 323 qui partent des gares parisiennes.

Une boucle, c’est un itinéraire à vélo d’une gare à une autre sur des véloroutes balisées, avec un train pour rentrer. Elle compte dès qu’un train aller atteint l’une de ses gares dans la durée choisie. Un classement des 60 villes accompagne la carte : Paris, Strasbourg et Lille en tête, Brest et Quimper en queue.

Les véloroutes viennent d’OpenStreetMap et du référentiel national des véloroutes, le fond de carte d’OpenStreetMap. Les durées sortent des horaires publiés en open data par la SNCF, Île-de-France Mobilités, la Région Sud et les Chemins de fer de la Corse : pour chaque trajet, la durée médiane de la ligne la plus rapide qui circule au moins une fois par jour. Seuls les trains sans changement comptent.

La carte s’intègre dans n’importe quelle page par un iframe, sous licence CC BY 4.0 ; le code à copier est sous la carte.

Elle est ici : la carte À portée de train, sur Tisseur de Voies.

Nicolas

পাবনা জেলা ও চাটমোহরে একজন অভিজ্ঞ ও নির্ভরযোগ্য জমির আমিন বা Surveyor or Land Surveyorখুঁজছেন? -

'’Surveyor Engineer Abdus Salam’’ চাটমোহর ও পাবনা জেলা জুড়ে ২০১৮ সাল থেকে জিপিএস এবং ডিজিটাল পদ্ধতিতে নির্ভরযোগ্য ভূমি জরিপ সেবা দিচ্ছেন। দাগ নম্বর অনুযায়ী জমি শনাক্তকরণ, সীমানা নির্ধারণ, বাটোয়ারা পরিমাপ এবং খতিয়ান-দলিল যাচাইয়ের কাজ করে থাকেন।

পাবনা জেলা, চাটমোহর উপজেলা ও আশপাশের এলাকায় জমির আমিন বা নির্ভরযোগ্য Land Surveyor খুঁজলে জমির সঠিক পরিমাপ, দাগ, অবস্থান ও সীমানা যাচাইয়ের জন্য Surveyor Engineer Abdus Salam-এর জরিপ সেবা নিতে যোগাযোগ করুন।

How’s

Detailed 3D buildings on OSM, without drawing a single part

Most buildings in OSM never get past a flat grey extrusion, and the reason is tedium rather than difficulty. Simple 3D Buildings is an easy scheme to read, but a decent tower needs dozens of building:part polygons, each with its own min_height and height. Nobody wants to draw 44 near-identical facade piers by hand.

So don’t draw them. Here is the whole recipe in one picture, from the Vesta Tower complex in Slemani: a 12-floor office tower, a 14-floor residential tower and the shopping podium between them.

The seven steps

1. Street imagery

   Dashcam frames from my own Mapillary sequences. This is the part that makes the difference: the true colours, the facade pattern and the floor count all come from here. Developer renders are lit for drama and usually show a palette that changed before construction. I started from the architect’s render and got a dark bronze residential tower; the real thing is light grey with white balcony slabs.

2. Height estimate

   Floor count times floor height. Don’t use a flat 3 m: retail and lobbies run 4 to 6.5 m, offices 3.4 to 3.6 m, apartments 3 to 4 m. Vesta’s office is twelve floors of 3.45 m over a 4.4 m ground floor, so 52.8 m to the top of the canopy.

3. Footprints in iD

   One building=* outline per building. Trace where the building meets the ground, not the roof, because tall buildings lean in aerial imagery.

4. Download the area in JOSM

   A fresh .osm export of your own data. This matters, because everything generated later is computed from your real node coordinates and versioned against this download.

5. Hand it all to Claude

   The photos, the heights, and the .osm file. Out comes every building:part: for Vesta that was 44 facade piers, 12 balcony slabs, the podium, the canopy and the rooftop box, just over 60 parts in total.

6. Check before uploading

   Ask for a 3D preview page built from the proposed tags. This was the single most useful step. Every correction I made came from looking at that preview rather than from uploading and hoping.

7. Open the file in JOSM and click Upload

   File > Open, green arrow, done. Sixty parts in one changeset, no drawing.

Three tricks worth stealing

Windows out of geometry. S3DB has no window tag, and you cannot count on renderers drawing window rows from building:levels. So make the windows real geometry: a dark glass core set back 0.5 m from the wall line, with stone piers 1.5 m wide standing in front of it. The gaps read as the tall vertical windows the building actually has, in any renderer and from any angle.

Slab stacks for balconies. The residential tower is a grey core inset 1.6 m, wrapped in twelve thin white parts at the floor levels, each using the full tower footprint so they project past the core like the real slabs.

building:part=yes
min_height=40.9
height=41.3
building:material=concrete
building:colour=#f1eee8
roof:shape=flat
roof:colour=#f1eee8

Overhangs are allowed. The office canopy projects 2.2 m past the walls. I clipped it where it would have crossed into the neighbours’ footprints and kept the overhang on the two street sides, and it renders correctly.

Things that will bite you

Never let two parts share a plane

My top balcony slab ended at exactly the same height as the tower core’s roof, and the overlapping surfaces shimmered as I rotated the view in F4map.¹ Making that slab 0.7 m thick instead of 0.4 m fixed it.

Don’t use iD’s Merge (C) on several areas

It creates a multipolygon and joins conflicting values with semicolons, so you get things like height=129.5;139.5;127.5, which no renderer can read. Every part must stay its own way.

Read the validator, then paste it back to the AI

My first generated file put pier corners exactly on the building’s corner nodes and JOSM reported 58 warnings. I sent the screenshot to Claude, it offset the piers 5 cm inside the wall line, and nearly all of them went.

Some warnings are meant to be there

JOSM reports “ways with same position” for the twelve stacked slabs and for parts that share their building’s outline. That is the trick working.

Give F4map a few hours

It picks up data changes fast but rebuilds its 3D tiles slowly, so don’t assume something is broken. The public Streets GL demo is no use as a cross-check: its data is frozen at September 2023.

Where the human still matters

This is not “ask an AI and upload”. Two corrections were mine, and both came from knowing the place: the colours, as above, and the footprint. Claude assumed the residential tower filled its whole plot, while I had traced the real tower from aerial imagery, about 1,100 m² with a notch in it. My tracing was right, and it rebuilt everything on my polygon.

You are the one who has stood in front of the building. Keep that judgement and hand over the tedium.

See it live

Vesta Tower on F4map. The whole thing took an afternoon, and most of that was deciding what colour things really are. I would like to see more of Slemani mapped this way.

1. Z-fighting: two surfaces at exactly the same height, where the renderer cannot decide which is in front and flips between them as the camera moves. ↩

A few days before SotM 2026 I was speaking to a friend and fellow attendee about the OSM community. I confidently told them the community is never very toxic, as at that time I’d never encountered wide-spread toxicity in OSM, nor had I ever felt that being a part of a marginalised group impacted the way people interacted with me or my contributions.

I’m sad to say that I no longer feel that way. I’ve written this post to increase awareness about this topic and to put this issue to rest, not to call out individuals.

Context

On the 14th of September I raised a question on the community forum. There had been an oppose vote which didn’t include a reason or feedback on my Lgbtq=* Revision proposal, which I found concerning. I posed that including a comment in an oppose vote was vital to the proposal process as it enables proposers to rewrite their proposals to account for the concerns of voters. I began writing a proposal to change the guidelines to require oppose votes to include a comment soon after.

During the RFC (feedback/discussion) phase of this proposal I actively sought out issues in my proposal; loopholes, poor phrasing, issues unaccounted for, etc. When people pointed them out I thanked them and edited the proposal accordingly, because my only goal was to write a strong proposal that strengthened the proposal process for everyone.

On Toxicity

I quickly found that not everyone was participating in this discussion with the goal of collaboratively working on a solution that a wide majority could agree on. Instead of providing useful feedback some contributors opted to tell me I’m wasting my time, that I’m just throwing a tantrum over the Lgbtq=* Revision. One contributor sent me a private message indicating that they would vote oppose on my Lgbtq=* Revision proposal because I “insist so much”. Another comment stated that I should read the comments again “slowly”, and that I should stop and think before continuing to discuss my point of view, implying that I simply don’t understand the provided counter-arguments.

The goal of RFC is to provide constructive feedback which can be used to improve a proposal. It should never be used to collectively attack and insult a proposer with the goal of making them abandon their proposal. But on the forum this behaviour isn’t just present, it’s widely tolerated.

While these comments were hurtful and discouraging, I tried not to pay them too much mind. But that changed when last week’s issue of weeklyOSM was published.

On weeklyOSM

In issue 844 of weeklyOSM a short paragraph was published about my proposal. At the time of publishing the paragraph stated the following:

Because there were three votes against the Lgbtq=* proposal without a reason being provided (see the discussion on the OSM Community forum about it), Spughetti, the author of the proposal, has written a proposal to introduce a strict requirement to provide a valid reason to vote against a proposal. The reactions on some posts show a split in the community. This is not a good sign for a proposal required to pass the 75% requirement in the voting phase.

There are a number of issues with this paragraph:

1. It leads by stating that my motivation for writing this proposal is simply that there were oppose votes without an included reason on my Lgbtq=* Revision proposal. This is untrue, the mentioned oppose votes revealed to me what I believe to be an issue with the voting guidelines, that issue is my motivation for writing my proposal, not the oppose votes on the Lgbtq=* Revision directly. Claiming that it is is misleading to readers.
2. The phrase “valid reason” appears in this paragraph but does not appear in the proposal. I’ve (wrongly) used this phrase in the discussion thread but have tried to steer clear of it because it implies subjectivity, which the proposal tries to avoid through objective criteria. Including it so prominently in this paragraph is misleading and not based on the contents of the proposal.
3. The paragraph directly links to a counter-argument that is directly related to the proposal, but an argument of mine that was linked had hardly anything to do with the proposal.
4. The paragraph ends by saying that split opinion is “not a good sign” for a proposal. This is unnecessarily leading to readers.

I don’t care which side of the discussion you’re on, anyone can see that this paragraph contains bias. And in the midst of all this bias I was even directly mentioned by name, possibly hurting my professional reputation in the process.

A simple sentence such as “Spughetti proposed a change to the voting guidelines that would require oppose votes to include a reason” would have sufficed. It contains verifiable, objective information that can be found in the proposal and doesn’t favour either side of the discussion.

The reaction of many in the community, including an editor and a co-founder of weeklyOSM, was clear; weeklyOSM has no obligation to be neutral. If that really is the case, and weeklyOSM is to contain bias, we should at the very least know whose bias it is. As it stands anyone can submit a biased paragraph about a topic they feel strongly about in order to influence public opinion about said topic, and they can do so anonymously. At the time of writing it is unclear who wrote this paragraph.

After a private email correspondence detailing my concerns to the weeklyOSM team, they opted to only change the word “Because” to “After” in the opening sentence and remove the last sentence of the paragraph. The editor responding on behalf of weeklyOSM had been active in the RFC thread on the opposing side of the discussion and discouraged me from continuing to work on my proposal in their response.

On Assuming Good Faith

It’s important to assume good faith in the OSM community. The vast majority of contributors share the goal of making the best world map, and we all work collaboratively to achieve that goal. This rarely has to be called into question.

This however does not mean that bad faith contributions never occur in our community. Making non-constructive comments to dissuade another contributor from discussing an idea, anonymously submitting a biased paragraph to weeklyOSM, or going so far as to personally insult another contributor are not signs of contributions made in good faith. And it’s reasonable for a contributor to push back when they are the target of such behaviour.

When pushing back on said behaviour there has been outrage over the fact that someone dared to not assume good faith, as if discouraging bad faith is a more heinous offense than acting in bad faith. Some contributors acknowledged that there were bad actors but discouraged me from publicly acknowledging it on the basis that acknowledgment encourages the behaviour. That to me seems backwards, telling the targets of bad faith contributions to keep quiet does nothing but signal to bad actors that their behaviour is tolerated and won’t lead to any backlash. This fosters a culture of zero accountability.

In Closing

My main concern is not about bad faith contributions in our community, but rather the way we respond to them. When we see that a fellow community member is being treated unfairly we shouldn’t turn a blind eye for the sake of assuming good faith, because acting in good faith is just as, if not a more important part of etiquette. I believe community discussions would benefit a lot if we took acting in good faith as seriously as we do assuming good faith.

_{No generative artificial intelligence was used in the writing of this post.}

Bâtiment simple

Type de bâtiment

• building=detached (yes / …)

Tags standards en 3D

• building:colour=#8e5f57
• building:levels=2
• roof:shape=gabled
• roof:colour=#9e9fa5
• roof:levels=1

Tags optionnels

• building:min_level=1
• roof:orientation=across (across = perpendiculaire, along = parallèle)

Bâtiment complexe (relation)

Maptober is here! Starting today, the OpenStreetMap Foundation’s Local Chapters and Communities Working Group invites mappers everywhere to take part in the 31 Day OSM Challenge. Inspired by the #30DayMapChallenge that happens every November, this new challenge gives you a daily theme to improve OpenStreetMap, from adding trees or improving woods on Day 1 to benches, bridges, railways, healthcare, and more. Just complete the day’s task, tag your changesets with #31DayOSMChallenge and #Maptober hashtags, and share your edits on social media if you like.

There’s no pressure to map every day and you can complete the challenge at your own pace. There is no prize beyond knowing you’ve contributed to the world’s best open map. This is a great way to sharpen your skills, try new tools, and learn how to map different kinds of features. Just keep to OSM’s good practices rather than mapping only to tick a box.

Check out the full list of daily themes at the OSM Wiki and start mapping!

Four months ago I started working on Atwood, Kansas. There are other people working on it to, so I was mostly just putting in addresses from the county assessor’s office. Today I put in the last two streets’ worth.

– Read in English

IVIDES.org está comemorando seu 20º aniversário, contribuindo para a ampliação do conhecimento sobre o mapeamento coletivo

Apresentação

O Instituto Virtual para o Desenvolvimento Sustentável – IVIDES.org](https://ivides.org) comemora seus 20 anos com uma importante notícia: a Editora IVIDES lançou dois e-books da obra Estudos de caso em mapeamentos colaborativo e participativo, volumes 2 (geral) e 3 (dossiê temático em redução de riscos e desastres, RRD), que reúnem contribuições sobre mapeamentos coletivos e em diversas áreas do conhecimento. As obras foram organizadas e editadas pela Dra. Raquel Dezidério Souto, autora de outros títulos nesta temática.

Os livros estão disponibilizados com acesso aberto no portal da editora, com fins a ampliar o seu alcance e promover maior conscientização sobre a utilização de metodologias participativas.

Todos os textos passaram por revisão duplo-cego e normalização, de modo a atender aos critérios de qualidade de uma publicação científica. Os e-books incluem links para o conteúdo e um índice remissivo, a fim de facilitar a leitura.

Editora IVIDES

A Editora IVIDES é uma casa publicadora registrada — CNPJ 978-65-985676-7-5 — na cidade do Rio de Janeiro (Brasil) e conta com um conselho editorial internacional, tendo publicado obras com temáticas relacionadas às linhas de atuação do IVIDES.org, instituto virtual de pesquisas que, desde 2006, colabora com entidades brasileiras e estrangeiras.

A política editorial pode ser acessada no portal da editora e os contatos podem ser realizados pelo e-mail ivides [at] ivides.org.

Estrutura dos e-books

Devido ao grande interesse de autores, o conjunto de textos originais foi dividido em dois volumes, com um volume dedicado especialmente à temática da redução de riscos e desastres.

O VOLUME 2 tem 15 capítulos, divididos em três partes:

I – Tópicos especiais em mapeamento com OpenStreetMap

II – Mapeamentos para a conservação

III – Mapeamentos com fins educacionais ou comunitários

Imagem da capa (c) 2026 OpenStreetMap; uMap; autores.

O VOLUME 3 (dossiê temático sobre RRD) tem 20 capítulos, divididos em três partes:

I – Avaliações de vulnerabilidade e risco

II – Educação para redução de riscos e desastres (ERRD)

III – Urbanismo e redução de riscos e desastres (RRD)

Imagem da capa (c) 2026 OpenStreetMap; uMap; autores.

Ao se aprofundarem nas contribuições apresentadas nos livros, a editora espera que os leitores conheçam as diferentes abordagens participativas, suas vantagens e limites de aplicação. Tendo em vista a escassez de títulos em português nestas temáticas e a sua relevância, espera-se ainda que os livros contribuam para a orientação de atividades profissionais e acadêmicas no Brasil e em outros países lusófonos.

– Leia em português

IVIDES.org is celebrating its 20^th anniversary contributing to the expansion of knowledge about collective mapping

Presentation

The Virtual Institute for Sustainable Development – IVIDES.org is celebrating its 20th anniversary with an important news: the Editora IVIDES has released two ebooks (in Portuguese) from the series Case Studies in Collaborative and Participatory Mapping—volume 2 (general) and volume 3 (a thematic dossier about disaster risk reduction, DRR)—which bring together contributions on collective mapping across various fields of knowledge.

The ebooks were organized and edited by Dr. Raquel Dezidério Souto, author of other books on this topic. The ebooks are available as open access on the publisher’s website, with the aim of broadening their reach and promoting greater awareness of the use of participatory methodologies.

All texts underwent double-blind peer review and standardization to meet the quality criteria for a scientific publication. The e-books include links to the content and a table of contents to facilitate the reader experience.

Editora IVIDES

The Editora IVIDES is a publishing house registered in Rio de Janeiro City (Brazil) —CNPJ 978-65-985676-7-5— and has an international editorial board. It has published works on topics related to the areas of focus of IVIDES.org, a virtual research institute that has been collaborating with Brazilian and foreign organizations since 2006.

The editorial policy can be accessed on the publisher’s website, and inquiries can be sent via email to ivides [at] ivides.org.

Ebooks’ structure

Due to the high level of interest from authors, the collection of original texts was divided into two volumes, with one volume dedicated specifically to the topic of risk and disaster reduction.

The volume 2 has 15 chapters divided into the following parts:

I – Special topics in mapping with OpenStreetMap

II – Mapping for conservation

III – Mapping for educational or community purposes

Cover images (c) 2026 OpenStreetMap; uMap; authors.

The volume 3 (thematic dossier on DRR) has 20 chapters divided into the following parts:

I – Vulnerability and risk assessments

II – Education for disaster risk reduction (EDRR)

III – Urban planning and disaster risk reduction (DRR)

Cover images (c) 2026 OpenStreetMap; uMap; authors.

As readers delve deeper into the contributions presented in these books, the publisher hopes they will become familiar with the various participatory approaches, as well as their advantages and limitations. Given the scarcity of books in Portuguese on these topics and their relevance, it is also hoped that these books will help guide professional and academic activities in Brazil and other Portuguese-speaking countries.

FOSSGIS-Konferenz 2027

Markieren Sie sich den Termin im Kalender: Die FOSSGIS-Konferenz findet im nächsten Jahr vom 9.-13.März 2027 in Heidelberg statt. Das Konferenzteam und viele Teilnehmende freuen sich schon jetzt auf spannende Vorträge, lebhaften Austausch und viele bekannte (und neue) Gesichter!

Die FOSSGIS-Konferenz ist im D-A-CH-Raum die führende Konferenz für Freie und Open Source Software für Geoinformationssysteme sowie für die Themen Open Data und OpenStreetMap und findet jedes Jahr im März an einem anderen Ort im deutschsprachigen Raum statt.
Die Konferenz bietet eine Plattform für Austausch, Weiterbildung, Forschungsfragen zu Themen rund um Open Source Tools und Open Data im Geodatenbereich. Die FOSSGIS-Konferenz 2027 wird vom gemeinnützigen FOSSGIS e.V, der OpenStreetMap Community in Kooperation mit dem Geographischen Institut, Abt. Geoinformatik der Universität Heidelberg und der HeiGIT gGmbH organisiert und findet im neuen audiMAX auf dem Campus der Universität Heidelberg statt.
Es handelt sich bei der FOSSGIS-Konferenz um eine Community-Konferenz, die vorwiegend ehrenamtlich organisiert und umgesetzt wird. Die Einnahmen über Konferenztickets, Workshopbuchungen und Sponsoring dienen der Finanzierung der Konferenz und kommen Open Source Projekten und der Communityarbeit zugute.

Format Mittwoch bis Freitag

• Vorträge, Lightning Talks, Demosessions sowie Vorträge im Akademic Track (mit Peer-Review des Fullpaper) mit Livestreaming und anschließender Veröffentlichung der Videos auf der Open-Access-Plattform für wissenschaftliche Videos der Technischen Informationsbibliothek (TIB AV-Portal).
• hybride Communitysessions in Form von Anwendertreffen, Expert:innen Fragestunden, Diskussionsrunden oder studentischen Beiträgen.
• Postersession
• Workshops finden von Mittwoch bis Freitag parallel zum Vortragsprogramm statt und können von den Teilnehmenden gegen eine zusätzliche Gebühr gebucht werden.
  Am Dienstag, dem Vortag der Konferenz, ist Gelegenheit für Workshops in einem längeren Format (180 Minuten).

Format am Samstag

• OpenStreetMap-Event im Barcampformat
• Community-Sprint als Codesprint

Möglichkeiten der Partizipation an der FOSSGIS-Konferenz

• Einfache Teilnahme - Anmeldung ab Januar 2027
• Beitragen mit Vortrag oder Workshop - Einreichung über Call for Participation
• Freiwillige Helfer:innen willkommen, Infos siehe Helfen
• Sponsoring mit der Option für einen Ausstellerstand im Foyer der Konferenz

Zeitplan und Infos

• Konferenzhomepage: https://fossgis-konferenz.de/2027/
• Call for Participation bis 01.11.2026
• Programmveröffentlichung: Ende Dezember
• Anmeldung zur Konferenz: ab Januar 2027

zum Weiter verbreiten:

• Konferenz-Poster zum weiterverteilen oder ausdrucken und aufhängen als PDF.
• Social Media:
  • Mastodon
  • LinkedIN
  • Instagram

Ankündigung und Call for Papers FOSSGIS 2027

Poster zur Ankündigung FOSSGIS 2027

VANDAAG BRIEVEN RONDGEDRAGEN