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Dear OpenStreetMap Community, fellow mappers

It is my pleasure to present the annual report of the OpenStreetMap Foundation for the year 2022.

First and foremost, we have been thrilled to welcome Grant, our first employee. He has joined the OpenStreetMap Foundation as our senior SRE after many years of volunteering on the Operations Working Group, and we believe that his expertise and experience is a valuable asset to the OpenStreetMap Foundation. We now finally have someone with the both the time and experience to tackle the big infrastructure projects that will lead us to increased resiliency and stability.

If you would like to learn more about Grant and his work, you can listen to an interview with him on the geomob podcast.

The growth of the OpenStreetMap project isn’t slowing down. We recently passed 8 billion nodes, 900 million ways and 10 million relations. We will reach 10 million registered users in 2023.

As the OpenStreetMap project continues to grow, the workload for the Foundation’s volunteer board members has also increased. While we are thrilled to see the project’s success, it is important to acknowledge that this growth also comes with its challenges. In particular, the increased workload can be overwhelming at times, and it is not always easy or fun. This year has, counterintuively, been marked by a relative lack of activity from the Foundation’s board members. While this is not new or unique to the OpenStreetMap Foundation, several of our board members have experienced burnout and have taken a step back from their roles. The burden of board work can be heavy - you join because you think maps are fun, and you end up spending your free time knee-deep in finance, HR and legal matters.

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Location: Bellingham, Southend, London Borough of Lewisham, Greater London, England, SE6 3HD, United Kingdom
Posted by PixelDubs on 10 December 2022 in English.

I recently watched a Jay Foreman video on why many maps have trap features. Features such as. Mispelled Names Non Existent Things Making something more bendy. They are done purpose, rather than people copying off OSM without attribution. They can copy OSM but it has errors on its map. But only minor changes so OSM can catch those without an attribution out or a service like Google Maps using OSM data without an attribution or credit.

Location: 89.993, -56.305

The new “Footways” category (under Transportation -> Walking) shows sidewalks, footways, steps, platforms and pedestrian zones. Sidewalks mapped on the street way (sidewalk:left, sidewalk:right resp. sidewalk:both) will be shown with an offset - hatching indicates the relation.

Screenshot of OpenStreetBrowser showing the "Footways" category. In the left side the map key for the category is visible, below some of the features in the map view. In the map view a popup on a street with sidewalks is open.

If you have an questions, comments or ideas, please create an issue on Github! Quite some new strings were added to the translation system. Your participation is highly appreciated!

As I’m involved in running the OSM Foundation board elections, I thought it would be interesting to share some statistics on the OSMF members who are eligible to vote this year, compared to last year.

Thanks and data sources

Thanks to:

Regions of OSMF members eligible to vote

This year 1518 out of 1937 OSMF members (as of 2022-12-07), from 96 countries, are eligible to vote in the 2022 board election. The regional distribution is shown on the image below and the table is also on the OSM wiki.

Regions of OSM Foundation members eligible to vote in 2021 and 2022 OSMF board elections

Notes:

See full entry

Posted by dcapillae on 9 December 2022 in Spanish (Español). Last updated on 10 December 2022.

Arqueta contraincendios Arqueta de hidrante contraincendios en Ciudad Jardín (ubicación). Fuente: trabajo propio (CC BY-SA 4.0) disponible en Wikimedia Commons.

Los hidrantes contraincendios en el municipio de Málaga ya aparecen en el mapa de OpenStreetMap. Se trata de una nueva importación de datos a partir datos abiertos del Ayuntamiento de Málaga.

La mayoría de los hidrantes son de tipo subterráneo, es decir, accesibles a través de una arqueta situada en el suelo, como la que aparece ilustrando esta entrada. Solo unos pocos hidrantes en el municipio, que también han sido añadidos al mapa, son de tipo columna.

Con esta nueva importación se han añadido al mapa 1217 nuevos hidrantes, a los que hay que sumar los que ya había en el mapa con anterioridad. En total, 1222 hidrantes pueden ahora encontrarse en el mapa, 5 de tipo columna y 1217 soterrados en arqueta.

See full entry

Location: Ensanche Centro, Centro, Málaga, Málaga-Costa del Sol, Málaga, Andalucía, 29001, España
Posted by watmildon on 9 December 2022 in English. Last updated on 28 March 2024.

Update: Check out my comment below about the state of the art being greatly improved!

Northeast US address density

The idea

After finishing my first address import I was looking for a good view of “where else needs addresses”. One trick that always pays dividends for me is to look at distributions of ratios of various quantities. In particular, I presumed there should be a pretty smooth distribution to the ratio of number of addresses vs number of buildings in any given area.

Building it

osmconvert alabama-latest.osm.pbf -o=alabama-nodes.csv --max-objects=50000000 --all-to-nodes --csv="@lat @lon addr:housenumber building"
  • A bit of C# to do the binning (I’m sure QGIS and other tools are great for this but you use what you know)
  • Tableau Public for the viz generation

The results

See full entry

Many of the features we had to deal with in the Sq___ renaming were small streams and creeks. For some reason, Sq___ Creek seemed to be a very popular name. In most cases, the creeks weren’t present on OSM, and as part of the renaming, we decided to add missing features with the new names so that future mappers wouldn’t unknowingly add the features with the old Sq___ names. So, we had to map a lot of small creeks.

One of the challenges with mapping named waterways is identifying the full extent of the waterway. Where is the mouth of the waterway? Where is the source? Of the many branches upstream from the mouth, which branch is the identified course?

If you’re just working with GNIS, the GNIS data has two or sometimes three sets of coordinates for waterway features. The first coordinate is the mouth. If there is a second coordinate, it falls somewhere in the middle of the waterway. The last coordinate is the source.

From there, you can use topo and aerial maps to trace the course of the waterway by hand.

Alternatively, you can download the local data file from the National Hydrography Dataset, find the waterway you want, merge it into an OSM layer, and clean it up before uploading it. Here’s how that works:

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Posted by Ivy Perez on 8 December 2022 in English. Last updated on 23 June 2024.

The celebrations have been over for more than a week, yet the Pista ng Mapa X State of the Map Asia 2022 spirit still abound!

The first international conference I attended just happened so fast. I still remember the time that I was accepted as one of the local travel grantee of this international conference in Albay, Legazpi. One thing that came into my mind for attending the conference is that I will be seeing the beauty of great Mt. Mayon but I was wrong, It was the experiences and learnings that will be my souvenir once I got home.

I had been part of the Viscan YouthMappers Organization in Visayas State University in Baybay City, Leyte, Philippines. Since I joined the organization months ago, I started contributing in Open Street Map to map places that needed help on disaster response and planning on a certain area. Through this conference, I was able to share my hardwork and perseverance to other people I just met.

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Location: Gabas, Patag, Baybay, 5th District, Leyte, Eastern Visayas, 6521, Philippines
Posted by mcepl on 8 December 2022 in English. Last updated on 24 December 2022.

I understand that for most members of this community this is offensively primitive, but I have spent an hour ploughing through all APIs, so until https://github.com/mocnik-science/osm-python-tools/issues/70 is fixed perhaps it helps somebody:

# From URL (e.g., "https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/30722274#map=14/49.2925/38.1815")
# to geo-URI of the center of the object: geo:49.2953098,38.1827257

import os.path
import sys
import urllib.parse
from OSMPythonTools.cachingStrategy import CachingStrategy, JSON
from OSMPythonTools.api import Api
from shapely.geometry import shape

CachingStrategy.use(JSON, cacheDir=os.path.expanduser("~/.cache/osm"))

api = Api()

parsed_url = urllib.parse.urlparse(sys.argv[1])
way = api.query(parsed_url.path)
geom = shape(way.geometry())
print(f"geo:{geom.centroid.y:.7f},{geom.centroid.x:.7f}")

Complete program is now hosted at https://sr.ht/~mcepl/osm_where/

Posted by LySioS on 8 December 2022 in French (Français). Last updated on 3 January 2026.

Illustration de la BANO (OpenStreetMap France)

Les adresses ont toujours été un réel problème pour tout nouvel utilisateur OSM. C’est encore plus problématique lorsqu’en tant que contributeur, l’on veut s’y attaquer – tellement l’entreprise est immense et les pièges nombreux.

Heureusement, les astuces et outils mis en place par la communauté de longue date couplés à l’obligation légale récente pour les communes de création d’une base adresse vont bouleverser cet état de fait.

Dans cet article, je m’attacherai à faire le point sur les outils qui sont à notre disposition pour cartographier les adresses, mais aussi à expliquer les différences entre BANO, BAN et BAL et leurs ressources associées. Pour finir, je vous exposerai ma façon de renseigner les adresses de la manière la plus complète possible.

Outils d’adressage de masse

See full entry

Insert Wikidata into POI in OsmAnd

Inserir Wikidata em POI no OsmAnd

Brief tutorial on how to insert Wiki (Wikipedia/Wikidata) into Points of Interest (POI) in OsmAnd application with OpenStreetMap map. By Túllio M. Franca - UMBRAOSM

Breve tutorial de como inserir Wiki (Wikipédia/Wikidata) em Pontos de Interesse (POI) no aplicativo OsmAnd com mapa OpenStreetMap. Por Túllio M. Franca - UMBRAOSM

https://pt.slideshare.net/umbraosm/inserir-wikidata-em-poi-no-osmand-254777845

Tulio França https://www.instagram.com/ondecetaa/

UMBRAOSM - União dos Mapeadores Brasileiros do Openstreetmap www.umbraosm.com.br

8Hours on Air 8Hours on Land

Inaugural State Of The Map Conference Nigeria 2022

The thing that made me attend this meeting was to share my experience from a big project that took place here in our country in Tanzania, which was related to the collection of Mills Information to check the level of food and nutrition. It was a Community-oriented project that involved 1091 community members and 1091 motorcycle riders.

TANZANIA NATIONWIDE MILLS CENSUS REPORT, 2022 Tanzania Nationwide Mills Mapping

Apart from sharing our experience, the other purpose of attending the conference was to get different backgrounds from different countries and see what they were doing and if we could do it in our country.

See full entry

Location: Alakahia, Obio/Akpor, Rivers State, 500004, Nigeria

Community Mapping - OSM

Mapeamento de Comunidades - OSM

Mapeamento de Comunidades - OSM Presentation of the Community Mapping Project in Brazil on OpenSreetMap integrated with other free platforms such as OpenAerialMap, Mapillary and Wiki as well as the use of StreetComplete. By Túllio M. Franca - UMBRAOSM

Apresentação do Projeto de mapeamento de comunidades no Brasil no OpenSreetMap integrado a outras plataformas livres como OpenAerialMap, Mapillary e Wiki bem como uso do StreetComplete. Por Túllio M. Franca - UMBRAOSM

https://pt.slideshare.net/umbraosm/mapeamento-de-comunidades-osm

Tulio França https://www.instagram.com/ondecetaa/

UMBRAOSM - União dos Mapeadores Brasileiros do Openstreetmap www.umbraosm.com.br

Just discovered this user 4 days ago from this note. This user is not a vandal or anything, a user has no edits yet instead of deciding that it already existed in OpenStreetMap, but it isn’t lived in OpenStreetMap. It existed on other maps likely than Google Maps.

Location: Makiling, Calamba, Laguna, Calabarzon, 4027, Philippines
Posted by Nahomi Garcia on 6 December 2022 in English.

Whether you’ve just completed school or you graduated decades ago, there are likely many things you don’t know about the extraordinary planet on which we live.

For instance: Were you aware that the Pacific Ocean is shrinking every year? Or that the world includes a sea without coasts? Or that Alaska isn’t just the westernmost state in the U.S., but the easternmost as well?

The third rock from the sun is much more complex than you may think — as evidenced by these alternative facts about geography.

Location: Lystvet, Skjelle, Skiptvet, Østfold, 1816, Norway