Whoami?

Hi, I’m a mapper from the Netherlands. I recently became more active, after some initial casual steps such as adding a local POI, or adding oneway to a roundabout when on holiday and annoyed that the local offline router would send me against traffic.

Recently I’ve joined the community in an effort to make the openstreetmap the most accurate and up to date map available - at least where I can help it. 😉

To do this, I look stuff up on the wiki and will contribute there on occasion as well when I think I’ve got something to add. I try to keep my osmose issues at zero at all time and learn about quality mapping while doing so (but had to give up on OSMI unfortunately).

If you came because you came across one of my changeset and have questions, you might find the information below helpful. If you would still like to know more, please don’t hesitate to send me a private message.

Sources

As many Dutch mappers, you’ll see me rely heavily on Dutch open information sources, some of which are made available as layers in JOSM even. I’ll credit them in my changeset by acronym (as do many), below you find a list of what they are.

• BAG: Basisregistratie Adressen en Gebouwen
  Aka the Key register Addresses and Buildings
  This contains information about (and mutations on) Dutch buildings and can be imported / updated from with a special JOSM plug-in.

• BGT: Basisregistratie Grootschalige Topografie
  Aka the Key register Large-scale Topography
  Contains information on local elements varying from roads and all their (traffic calming), streetnames, to tree’s/landuses, public amenity’s, etc. Available as map layer in JOSM that can be used as a source for presence of objects, position and/or shape.

• BGT2OSM:
  Based on the above BGT, there’s an ongoing effort in the Dutch community to be able to import information from BGT in way that isn’t tracing the map layer into the OSM layer by hand. Currently available in the form of an additional layer that data can copied from into the OSM (and optionally replacing existing shapes trough utilsplugin2 for JOSM.
  
  Please note: There is still ongoing discussion whether to add a specific source tag to this. For some people it provides valuable information on it’s accuracy or why the shape might be different as visible on aerial imagery, vs the experiences with https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:source=3dshapes - where people don’t remove it when it’s no longer relevant. My personal opinion is that it’s easier to remove then add afterwards. As there is consent on it’s general potential value, I will add at least https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:source:geometry=bgt2osm when using this source, a :date when relevant (the file is a one time export, so it might be relevant when it’s date differs from the edit-date) and/or https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:source=BGT when that’s the source of the object.

• DKK: De Kadastrale Kaart (of ook wel BasisRegister Kadaster / BRK)
  Aka the Key register Kadaster
  Contains the cadastral registration and the cadastral map (Kadastrale Kaart) - where land ownership and buildings starts and ends.

• KvK: Kamer van Koophandel
  Aka Chamber of Commerce
  Information about companies and where they are registered. Mainly access this trough their website to see if the company still exists and/or if they’ve moved.

• NSO: Netherlands Space Office
  Netherlands Space Office offers the same images as PDOK (mentioned elsewhere), but unfiltered in terms of quality: where PDOK always offers a clear, usable view, NSO allows to browse all imagery captured. While this includes ones partially or even totally covered by clouds, the benefit is that there are even more recent images available (usually the last month or two).

• Oblique or S&P Oblique: Slagboom en Peeters Geo-obliek beelden
  Aka Slagboom en Peeters Geo-oblique images
  Oblique aerial imagery are high resolution pictures taken from an plain. I’ve obtained access/license to use these for OSM from Slagboom en Peeters and mainly use them to verify what’s there in more detail, or figure things out can’t be seen from regular aerial (satellite) imagery. I’ll add source=oblique especially to objects that I couldn’t have otherwise added, and will credit Slagboom en Peeters in the source changeset as well (and when using source=aerial, I’m referencing regular aerial images).

• PDOK: Publieke Dienstverlening Op de Kaart
  Aka Public Services On the Map
  PDOK is where open source governmental information of The Netherlands get published, as usable layers for on a map among other things. Besides having high quality recent satellite imagery available, they also host some of the aforementioned data-layers, such as BGT. If you want to get blown away, have a go at their Pdok viewer.

• Aerial / Aerial Imagery
  This one is the exception to the rule: this obviously depends per region, and will be specified in the source of the changeset. However, when referring to Aerial, I’ll always be referring the latest satellite imagery for that region at that time unless explicitly stated otherwise.

Changelog

• 2025-08-31 Added information on BGT2OSM.
• 2024-09-08 Added NSO.
• 2024-07-02 Added an explanation about Aerial.
• 2024-06-15 First version, listing sources and methods I use.