In the ancient days, OSM was much simpler. You had the streets and roads. A crossing was considered a barrier along the way for road users (i.e. cars), so one would place a node with https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:highway=crossing where the crosswalk is located. The routeplanner would apply a time penalty, the rendering engine shows a little icon, and done.

With an extra attribute (namely crossing_ref) a more precise type and the type of markings was indicated.

Then, someone figured out they could also shove in information about the traffic signals. This kind of works for simple crossings, but breaks down for bigger intersections. https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:crossing=unmarked, https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:crossing=uncontrolled and https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:crossing=controlled were added. And https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:crossing=zebra, cause zebra crossings are so common. And https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:crossing=marked, which was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike ~~tea~~ https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:crossing=uncontrolled.

In the mean time, people started mapping cycleways and sidewalks/footways separately, giving rise to a second way of tagging crossings: along the way; as https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:highway=footway with https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:footway=crossing.

Some ported over the traffic signal metadata over on the way, as they were used to doing on a node. Others starting mapping the traffic lights separately, often as barrier at the precise location where the pedestrian/cyclist/car driver has to wait.

This gives the potential of having the traffic light metadata on three separate locations:

1) Once on the point where the road and the footway meet 2) Once on the footway, marked with crossing 3) Once on the traffic light node on the footway

In other words, the current tagging is a clusterfuck.

Why do I care?

… See full entry

This is the story of how the cycling association measured streets in Bruges and got what they wanted - a cycling zone - 5 years after the initial campaign…

The setup

First some belgian road law. One of the peculariaties of Belgian is that we have the concept of a ‘cyclestreet’. This is a street where cars are not allowed to overtake cyclists - one of the tools to make cities more liveable. A cycle zone is similar, except that it is about multiple streets. It needs different traffic signs and is in effect until the “end of cycle zone”-traffic sign.

The cycling association of Bruges wanted a cycling zone in the entire city center. To force this, they devised a plan using a different law. The Belgian road code says that cars are not allowed to overtake a cyclist if the space between a cyclist and the car would be less then 1 meter.

In other words, if the cycling association could prove that most of the streets in Bruges are too small to legally overtake cyclists anyway, that would be a good starting point to force a cycle zone in the city. In practice, it would make the already existing situation more explicit.

Enter OpenStreetMap

As such, the local cyclist association asked me to help them in 2020, in the middle of the corona lockdowns.

I did create a custom version of StreetComplete to ask for the street width (a quest that StreetComplete would officially add about a year later).

And, as such, we got out into the city and, armed with a laser measurement device, took the width of every street in the historic center - a perfect activity to do during the corona lockdowns.

To display the information, I setup a custom map theme on MapComplete (which was quite young as well) to show the widths of the streets.

Using the measured width, parking and sidewalk information, MapComplete can automatically determine which streets are to small to officially overtake a cyclist.

… See full entry

I made another small analysis about the reviews made with MapComplete and Mangrove. You can read all about it here:

https://pietervdvn.me/2025/03/01/an-overview-of-reviews-made-with-mapcomplete-2025-edition/

In the past weekend, I did (two) walks in Ghent where we used https://mapcomplete.org/surveillance to spot surveillance cameras. The press was interested as well, resulting in some interviews and articles!

Those are in Dutch of course.

The local TV did a decent job: https://avs.be/nieuws/openstreetmap-vrijwilligers-brengen-cameras-in-gent-in-kaart

The newspaper article: https://www.hln.be/gent/vrijwilligers-trekken-door-gentse-straten-om-alle-cameras-in-kaart-te-brengen-een-half-miljoen-hangen-er-in-dit-land-maar-niemand-weet-exact-waar~a8b9341c/ which isn’t to bad as well (paywalled, without paywall: https://archive.ph/4GUZQ)

And on VTM: https://www.vtmgo.be/vtmgo/afspelen/e9e73a3b-b932-400a-91b9-af78622cbbaf (starting at 20:30, account required; I wasn’t able to rip it)

Edit 2024-12-02: the local municipalities also wrote about it: https://www.wvigisco.be/tips-en-tricks/open-data/openstreetmap/vrijwilligers-inventariseren-bewakingscameras-met-mapcomplete/

(If you don’t want to create an account, you can also find them on my NAS)

As you might know, I’m the main developer of MapComplete. For those who don’t know, MapComplete is an OSM-viewer and editor, where contributors can easily answer questions, add new points and upload pictures from a POI from a cozy website. Instead of showing all data at once, it only shows one items within a single topic, resulting in many thematic maps to choose from.

Four years ago, I started with uploading images to IMGUR, a “free” (paid for by advertisements) image host. They were really permissive at the time, and I got the API up and running in about 15 minutes. For the past four years, they served us well with barely any trouble. They rarely had outages and if there was one, it only lasted a few hours at most.

But it was not meant to last. The first crack in this relationship was a little over a year ago. Igmur changed their terms of use, making clear that they would remove “images that aren’t watched often”. In practice, this was mostly meant to remove NSFW pictures from there platform, but it was a good excuse for us to start backing up all the imgur images linked to from OpenStreetMap.

The next omen was the change of terms. From being very permissive, those went to “please, don’t use IMGUR as your Content Distribution Network”, which pretty much is how MapComplete used IMGUR. Oops. In this forum thread, I wrote “I hope IMGUR wouldn’t notice us before MapComplete made the switch to Panoramax”.

Famous last words.

About a week later, our upload got blocked. Contributors were not able to upload new pictures anymore

As such, Thibault Mol setup a Panoramax instance to be used with MapComplete (thank you very much for this!). I spent quite some time to change MapComplete to support panoramax as backend, making uploads possible again!

This has been notable in the graph by TagHistory for Panoramax: one can notice the graph going steeper during october:

… See full entry

Hey all,

If you want to verify your OSM-account and get that nice badge, this is possible.

UPDATE: since june (or was it may?) 2025, the OSM website introduced “social links” in the user profile. You can link your mastodon account in there and save. (*)

Then, on your Mastodon-account, go to Preferences > Public Profile. Under ‘extra fields’, set ‘OpenStreetMap’ to the left and a link to your account to the right.

(*): Previously, one had to add a html-link with rel="me" attribute into the user profile.

2023 in review

Now that 2023 has come to an end, it is an appropriate time to take a look back and see what has happened within the MapComplete-sphere.

2023 also marked the year that I (pietervdvn) received a grant by NlNet, meaning that I could spend a ton of time on improving MapComplete - and with success.

Looking back, a humongous amount of work happened. I’m giving a quick recap here.

User survey and other statistics

I’ve started the year with orienting myself. I ran a user survey (part 1, 2 and 3) and analyzed how mapcomplete was used. For example, there are some interesting statistics about the number of pictures created and about the reviews that were made

Lots of improvements

Most of the work of course went to programming MapComplete, which underwent a few big changes (notably the UI-framework and Mapping-library) and received numerous small improvements.

A quick recap:

Svelte (Q1)

The first big change of the year was switching to an actual frontend framework. MapComplete was written in a hand-rolled framework, which wasn’t very performant. And while I really loved it, using Svelte made the frontend more approachable for other programmers, more maintainable and faster.

Svelte was chosen partly because it works and has a large ecosystem, but also because it turns out to be conceptually similar to the previous, handrolled framework. Even better: the old framework is so similar, that they can be used together! With a few tweaks and adaptions, they were made compatible.

The big advantage of this compatibility is that it becomes possible to gently migrate. Instead of porting everything at once, component per component can be switched when the time is right. As such, there are still a few components around written in the old framework, but they are slowly getting replaced.

… See full entry

This is part two which highlights the results of the OSM user survey. Read part 1 about demographics and identity and part 2 about the favourite maps

How well-known is MapComplete?

Not that well-known, it seems. In the previous question, 11 people out of 59 who took the time to fill out this question, mistook MapComplete for StreetComplete. This is a clear sign that there is still some work to do.

How did people get to know MapComplete?

How did people get to know MapComplete in the first place?

Via Reddit (13 mentions), Twitter and Mastodon (13 mentions) and the Weekly OSM (9 mentions).

There are honorouble mentions for online chatrooms (6 mentions), word of mouth (6 mentions), the OSM-forum (3 mentions) or ‘arriving via a specific map’ (3 mentions).

From these results, it’s clear that the online spaces where I regularly pitch MapComplete (namely Reddit and Mastodon) also resulted in some people discovering MapComplete.

However, this makes me wonder how applications such as StreetComplete and EveryDoor got to such a big userbase quickly. It seems that creating a mobile phone app with offline capabilities helps with this.

Good questions to ask next year?

I’m planning on doing a similar survey next year (or in one year and a half) to see how things evolve. To be able to compare results, it is interesting to have the same questions, even though some improvements can probably be made (e.g. in wording and more nuanced options).

It is also hard to gauge if people are part of a marginalized group. As such, it is hard to know if we reach those people as well.

But there might be room for other good questions. If you have suggestions, feel free to let them know

Anything else you’d like to say?

This was the question with the most uplifting answers, as many, many people wrote in a compliment about how much they like MapComplete and the work I did! (Well, some of them were probably thinking about StreetComplete)

Thank you everyone involved!

Conclusions

… See full entry

This is part two which highlights the results of the OSM user survey. Read part 1 about demographics and identity here

Which thematic maps do people use?

56 people gave insight in their favourite maps, yielding a total of 86 mentions of specific map themes or groups of themes.

The theme with the most mentions -namely 9- was the etymology theme. This is not a big surprise, as there has been a tremendous amount of changes made with Open Etymology-map. Some people mention curiosity for their local environment, others are interested in the link between OpenStreetMap and Wikipedia. It should be noted that nearly everyone who mentioned etymology indicates that they have hundreds of edits.

The second place goes to the waste theme with 8 mentions. I have to be honest, this came as a total surprise to me! At first sight, it is a bit of a boring topic - especially when contrasted with something like etymology. Yet, everyone needs to get rid of some waste every now and then. By the way, this theme was created by https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/Rlin and I have to admit that this is one of the most polished themes on MapComplete, using a lot of the available functionality. Thank you!

The third places goes to all cycling-related themes (7 mentions of ‘cycling’). Cyclofix had another 5 mentions, resulting in 12 total mentions. This was no surprise either, as cyclofix has been historic driver of many changes made with MapComplete. It is one of the oldest maps on MapComplete, yet it is still popular and is embedded on a few websites.

The third place goes to benches with 7 mentions - another very down-to-earth topic but with lots of value and lots of unmapped features.

Out of the other answers, it is clear that there are various reasons to use MapComplete:

… See full entry

MapComplete user census

As you noticed, MapComplete ran a user survey during january. What did it tell us?

The use survey had a few goals, namely:

• discovering what demographies are using MapComplete (and which are missing)
• and discovering what needs and wants are still there

Basic demography

The first question is of course: who did fill out the survey? If we look to the numbers, a clear pattern emerges.

The age distribution looks pretty normal - there is a clear peak around the bucket 30-40, which falls down left and right.

The gender is not as balanced. Unsurprisingly, the majority of respondents is male:

… See full entry

About a year ago, we launched a mapping campaign at the request from Visit Flanders (Toerisme Vlaanderen). This mapping campaign is focussed on some touristical POI, such as charging stations for ebikes, benches, picnic tables, public toilets and playgrounds. FOr this, a custom mapcomplete theme was created. (For a full explanation, see the last paragraph)

A part of the campaign involved a guided import. The agency had many datasets lying around (e.g. about benches or picnic tables) which they wanted to have imported in OSM. As doing a data import is hard and the data was sometimes outdated, we opted for a crowdsourced approach: for every possible feature, a map note was created containing a friendly explanation, information links, the tags to create and instructions to open MapComplete. When opened in mapcomplete, the user would be prompted to import the point or to mark it as not found or duplicate. All of these actions close the note with a small message on what the chosen action was.

Most map notes are closed by now, but the central question in this analysis today is: should remaining map notes be closed in batch, or do we leave them open for longer? Note that input of the local community will be gathered as well - this article will mostly serve as a point to start the discussion.

The datasets

Various datasets were provided to upload - which were converted into notes. In the table below, you’ll find a breakdown by topic, the date when they were uploaded, the number of notes created and how much of those notes were already closed and the top contributors for the category.

In this table, I’m not including if the feature has been added to OpenStreetMap, has been marked as not existing anymore or marked as being a duplicate.

Most of those notes have been opened by a dedicated account, except for two imports which accidentally did not use this account (noted in the table below).

… See full entry

10 days ago, I wrote an essay about Bing Map Builder and how it could be used to fork the OSM community.

I made a prediction there:

Assume that Bing Map Builder becomes a really decent and good editor and that about a third of the edits happen through Map Builder. Microsoft could then -at some time in the future- decide to let updates from Map Builder flow to Bing Maps first, and only let them flow towards OpenStreetMap at a later time, “to review them for quality”.

It seems that this prediction has become true already (1). In the discussion under my previous entry, people noticed that “no bing accounts appeared anymore” in the new to OSM-listing. Time to re-investigate!

So, what is the behaviour now? I drew a new building, clicked saved and… the building disappeared from my screen. When opening the network console, this network call proved my suspicions. The created data is now sent towards https://bing.com/mapbuilder/changeset/submit and contains the changeset data (and bit of extra information)

… See full entry

Edit (november 2025): Bing Maps Builder was abandoned in july 2024 - one year and a half after publishing the post below. In the meantime, I’d like to do a shoutout to an article about Visual Studio Code which expresses the same fear of community fracture that I feared for OSM.

Edit: A small update happened after publishing this article - you can read it here: @Pieter%20Vander%20Vennet/diary/400992

OpenStreetMap is in trouble

It is a long-standing tradition that every now and then, a member of the OpenStreetMap-community posts that OSM is in trouble. Often times, these essays complain about some trivial things which are, in the end, not that important. For example, they complain that we didn’t implement Bézier curves yet (we don’t need them), or that the data model is stale (it isn’t, new tagging appears every day), that the main OSM.org website doesn’t have some feature and isn’t on par with Google Maps (that’s by intent) or that AI will make the entire manual mapping space obsolete, in “just another ten years time”.

However, most of these things miss the crucial point of what OSM is: a community; a group of people that are working together on mapping the world in an Open Data way and building related tools with Open Source. Our strength is the unison in this goal, even though everyone pursues this differently, through different technological means and for different motivations. Motivations range from the most mundane reasons up till political activism. And that’s fine. All this activity and diversity strengthens us as a global community.

However, recently, a new participant has entered the ecosystem with parasitic intents. It tries to capture away precisely what makes OSM strong: the contributors.

The means to this end is called ‘Bing Map Builder’.

A bit of history

… See full entry

MapComplete has - for some thematic maps - the ability to leave a review on an entity with Mangrove.Reviews. Up till now, I had no idea how much this feature was used. However, due to technical reasons I had another look to the reviews module and discovered the ‘download all’-option on mangrove.reviews

Mangrove Clients

The analysis was made with data from 20 january 2023, downloaded around 17:00 UTC time.

This data contained 660 reviews. As the website making the review is recorded, we can make a breakdown of the top websites:

• https://mangrove.reviews is unsuprisingly the most popular website to make reviews on, with 318 reviews made
• MapComplete is the second (and the biggest ‘external’ website), with 192 reviews (of which 13 are made with the development version)
• toggenburg.swiss is third, with 35 reviews

A variety of smaller websites follows, each with a few reviews made. At first glance, most of them seem to be swiss or german. Furthermore, there are 5 reviews made by localhost:1234 and 7 by localhost:5000. The former is probably me, testing the creation of reviews while developing.

The full table is listed below.

… See full entry

What licenses are used?

Now that MapComplete is two-and-a-half year old, it’s a good time to see what license people are using to upload their images.

Why do I care?

The first reason to do this research is curiosity. How much pictures are uploaded with what license?

The second reason is a very practical and UX-driven: if a significant portion of contributors doesn’t bother to change the license, then the license picker can be moved from the ‘infobox’ into the ‘user settings’, freeing up valuable space there. User tests have pointed out that this is valuable.

Methodology

MapComplete uploads images to imgur.com and then links to this image using https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:image=https://i.imgur.com/aBcDeF123.jpg. Some metadata (most notably the author and chosen license) is added as ‘description’ to the image on Imgur. If multiple images are added, then keys image:0, image:1, image:2… is used.

At last, themes can also add images under a specific key. For now, only the etymology-map does this with image:streetsign.

Overpass was used to download all features with a tag matching one of the described keys and matching an imgur-url.

Then, the description of all those images is downloaded and parsed, yielding the needed metadata.

Even though some people did add images to imgur to link them to OpenStreetMap before, we assume that (nearly) no images will also have the license information encoded as MapComplete does. Furthermore, this does not keep images of now-deleted features into account, nor does it take images into account that have been deleted in the mean time. I don’t think it’ll make a big difference though.

The resulting datasets are here. The script to download this all is in the MapComplete repository. Keep in mind that using this script will exhaust the daily IMGUR rate limit; so please use a different access token or spread the download over two days as was done for this research.

Results

… See full entry

Hi all,

Hacktoberfest is a yearly event where contributors get a T-shirt from hacktoberfest.com if they improve an Open Source Project.

MapComplete is open for such improvements. Head over to the repository. An ideal to get started is by creating a map layer about something that is interesting to you.

If you have questions on getting started, feel free to ask in our chat channel on matrix/element (telegram bridge )

PlantNet.org offers an API which tries to determine the plant species based on some pictures.

I integrated this API into MapComplete, together with some queries to Wikidata. As a result, linking a tree to the correct species identifier is easier then ever and can be done with a few clicks:

Hey all,

In the past month, MapComplete was part of Open Summer of Code where 4 students and myself did make a lot of improvements and a new theme.

With this diary entry, I’d like to give you some insights in what we’ve done the past 4 weeks.

What is Open Summer of Code

Open Summer of Code (or OSOC) is a programme organized by Open Knowledge Belgium, which is a small belgian NGO that promotes Open Source and Open Data.

For OSOC, they search clients (organizations or governmental institutions) which have an interesting problem that they want solved and with budget to pay a team of about 4 students.

These 4 students will be guided by a coach (such as me) to make sure something useful comes out of it.

The actual problems are varied. We’ve had a planning tool for building new homes, a calendar application based on SOLID, a tool to discover research papers, …
The bottom line is that data must be open and that all produced software and tools will be open sourced. If possible, the programs should reuse existing tools and datasets, such as OpenStreetMap or wikidata.

OnWheels: the wheelchair accessibility map

One of the projects this year was paid for by BOSA (a belgian gov organization) requested by OnWheels - a belgian application which helps wheelchair users to navigate the world. They have a database of shops, restaurants and other amenties together with some info about them, such as name, contact details and opening hours, but also information about the width of the door, the height of the kurb at the entrance, …

During the past years, the idea of opening this data has grown within OnWheels, for various reasons. By opening the data, more people can reuse it. Furthermore, by switching to OSM, the cost of maintaining this data is shared amongst more people.

However, making the switch is not easy. With the OSOC-project, we wanted to create a first version of how an OnWheels 2.0 might work.

Whom is this app for?

… See full entry

For my work at anyways.eu, I’ve been tasked to make sure that all schools are in OSM - especially with capacity.

No better way to do this by making it easy for contributors to add the correct data… So, I wanted to create a MapComplete theme for education. Normally, I would open up the wiki to see what tagging is needed, but for schools there is very little tagging available at the moment, which is a mess.

As it turns out, schools are diverse and this is reflected in the tagging.

This diary entry serves two goals:

1. I want to organize my thoughts on how a tagging model could look like
2. It is meant to stir up some discussion.

Hopefully, some tagging proposals will come forward from from this post.

So, what is a school (or educational institute) anyway?

This is already a hard question. The openstreetmap-wiki on ‘education features’ states:

Education features are map objects and object features which relate to educational activities

Well, thanks, captain obvious.

Let’s turn to the International Standard Classification of Education (from Unesco) instead:

As national education systems vary in terms of structure and curricular content, it can be difficult to benchmark performance over time or monitor progress.

So, in other words, it is difficult as this can be highly different amonst regions. The ISCED-document however does a good job to draw some lines and to give some definitions.

What does a standard school curriculum look like?

In most countries, the school trajectory for most people (according the the ISCED, page 21) looks more or less as following (but the precise ages can vary with a few years):

Before formal education starts, kids younger then about 4 or 5 go to preschool/kindergarten. This is optional in most countries, and some education takes place, often to prepare spelling and simple math. ISCED calls this level 0

… See full entry

Hi all,

MapComplete has been (partially) translated in 21 languages by now - an amazing feat that I could never have done alone (for starters, I don’t speak 21 languages).

(For those that don’t know MapComplete - it is an easy-to-use map viewer and map editor. It shows POI on the map and when clicking something, shows the known information and asks questions about it)

Translating MapComplete started by manually editing the translation files, making a pull request, … A next step was moving over to Weblate, where there is more support for translations.

However, one has to know where to find this translations and translating can be tricky, figuring out which piece of text goes where.

That is why I launched a new feature today: toggling ‘translators mode’ (in the copyright tab) will add little buttons, taking you directly to the page to translate the string (or to fix some typos):

So: please help to translate MapComplete in your favourite language!

Some remarks:

… See full entry