I’ve been mulling over an idea for a while: what if we grab a complete snapshot of OpenStreetMap data for a given region, then run some statistics over it?

Things like which tags are most frequently used, who the top contributors are by edit count, and who has been active in that area the longest.

For the last one, “longest active” means the timespan between a contributor’s very first edit within that region and their most recent edit (also within that region). This distinction helps separate two very different contributor types: the one-hit wonders who show up during a mapping campaign, make a huge number of edits in a short burst, and then disappear forever; and the long-term caretakers, often locals, who quietly keep the map up to date whenever they notice changes in their surroundings.

To explore this idea, I had to build some tools.

Step one was downloading all OSM objects within a given administrative boundary (relation) : https://altilunium.github.io/osm-region-downloader/

Step two was writing a script to process that data : https://github.com/altilunium/osm-region-downloader/blob/main/proc.py

Once those were in place, I realized there was even more potential in analyzing tag usage.

So I built another tool. This one lets me browse tagging patterns in a region much more easily : https://github.com/altilunium/osm-region-downloader/blob/main/guimon3.py

Now I can dig into how tags are actually used across an area, and uncover some pretty interesting insights about both the map and the mappers.