2025.09.08

I am two days late to write this post. Life gets in the way. However, I felt I should have this in writing. On 6 September 2025, after 11:30 PM, I suddenly realized that the ending day marks something significant. It marks the 10th year completion of my journey with OpenStreetMap. 10 years ago, on this day in 2015, I entered a workshop arranged by Save the Children International in Bangladesh. The workshop was arranged by a project named Kolorob (Bengali word for the sound of a lot of people cheering together) who were training youths on how to edit OpenStreetMap. Little did I know back then that it will entirely change the direction of my life.

10 years since 6 September 2015 consists of 3654 days. Checking my HDYC told me that I mapped 3425 days in that 10 years. That is about 9.38 years of mapping each day. It felt quite overwhelming. Mapping became such an integrated part of my life that it hardly feels something I do, rather something automated that is to be done regularly.

It was a rewarding journey, mixed with bittersweet memories of field mapping in hot summer days in the sun, venturing to unknown areas for GPS tracks, remotely mapping areas after areas that I will probably never visit, spending hours after hours on validating, figuring out how to best map an area, learning new tools, plugins, taking workshops, teaching and training new mappers, solving data collection problems, and so on.

Over time, due to various aspects of life and career, I drifted apart from organized mapping community. However, my mapping continued. I kept mapping unmapped areas of the world. My joy is to take a part of the world with no features mapped and then completing it, literally putting it on the map.

I hope to continue my mapping journey, one day at a time.

Hello

y first day in mapping was sweet and exciting. I felt good to know that even small tasks I did could help improve global maps. It was interesting to discover how roads, buildings, and other features are added, and I enjoyed learning while contributing to something meaningful. That experience motivated me to keep mapping and to grow my skills further.

Hello OSM friends! I’m Bhausaheb…… from Nashik, working in GIS Industry as an GIS Engineer. Recently, I have been mapped new buildings around my locality using ID Editor.

(My first diary entry, am I doing this right?)

I’ve been mapping my beautiful town for now 1.5 or more years. I discovered OSM through a Polish youtuber talking about motorways, and at first I made some small changes, not knowing what I got myself into. Through the years, I’ve fixed the landuse, updated all of the POIs, kept up with constructions, repairs, etc., and did all sorts of detailing.

I’ve reached a point where… I need to move outwards. There is not much left to do except wait for something to close, open or change.

It’s been a heck of a ride. I would like to give the Polish OSM community a warm thank you for helping me out in sticky situations.

Link for the map, go explore!

Hello OSM friends! I’m Pratap from Mumbai, working in GIS. Recently, I mapped new buildings in my locality using iD editor and did QA checks with OSM Inspector. I’m excited to share my learning with the community

Lifecycle Tagging

Lifecycle tagging is the representation of the temporal state of an object (e.g., whether it is under construction, demolished, or abandoned). Since there is no single convention universally accepted by the community, different and inconsistent schemes have developed, making automatic interpretation and uniform data management difficult. In many map editors, there is no section dedicated to editing this lifecycle, which makes it even more difficult for new users to understand how to use the system.

The goal of this project is to devise and implement a method for applying lifecycle tagging in a way that is simple, intuitive, and does not interfere with existing tagging practices.

PR can be viewed here.

Study

Before fully committing to the development of a new interface, a study was conducted to assess which tagging schema is the most popular, consistent and suitable for integration into the iD editor. Many other editors have been. Full study available here.

I also tried many of the existing editors and checked how they supported lifecycle editing.

Proposed Standard

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SIWES Diary – Day 1 Date: 2nd September, 2025 Organization: Unique Mappers Network, Nigeria National Office: Suite 7, Mapathon Center, UNIPORT Mall, Abuja Campus, University of Port Harcourt

Activities:

-Reported to the National Office of Unique Mappers Network and settled into the Mapathon Center.

-Was introduced to the organization’s vision, mission, and the role of open mapping in sustainable development.

-Met fellow IT students including Favour, Alexander and Salvation, who are also undergoing their internship.

-Created an OpenStreetMap account and was tasked to locate my community and count the number of buildings. Many buildings were not visible, so using aerial imagery and my local knowledge, I edited the map by adding missing buildings.

-Since the office router had no internet subscription, I used my personal data for mapping and contributions.

-Received four major tasks for the internship period:

1. Watch the video “The Magic of Maps and Mapping” (YouTube link-https://youtu.be/5MyCtvSBATI?si=g6TM60pmY_oolnT) and reflect on how mapping can be applied to geology.

2. Work on mapping buildings in my community, since the area is not yet globally visible on OpenStreetMap.

3. Research and design an open mapping project that addresses at least five Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

4. Participate in research-related tasks assigned by the organization.

-Later in the day, I met the National Coordinator, Dr. Victor N. Sunday, who gave me a formal orientation. He emphasized the importance of my contributions and provided me with a WhatsApp link to join the National Community and Internship groups. Observations/Learning Points:

-Understood the operational structure of Unique Mappers Network and how it collaborates nationally on geospatial projects.

-Learned the importance of open data contribution to global platforms like OpenStreetMap.

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In 2025 alone I found vandalism incidents specifically targeting map of Indonesian parliament compound twice, in March and now in late August. Thankfully these are all restored.

What made me sad that some Indonesians don’t understand the OpenStreetMap at all, what they only know in their head is political activism. They do by erasing - or editing - the place of institution they despise. Not really sure if these incidents are unique to maps in Indonesia or there’s international example of politically motivated vandalism of OSM maps?

Styles for vector tiles are typically written in the MapLibre GL style language. These definitions exist in JSON, which, for various reasons, is not a good language for humans to write in. Software called Charites preprocessed my Street Spirit style to improve readability. This helped a great deal and removed the two largest pain points: no comments and only one file.

Charites’ main features are:1

1. letting you write in YAML instead of JSON,
2. importing other YAML files into the main one,
3. and the use of simple variables to allow common style constants to be set once.

I made use of the first two features, but I still found myself limited by them. I still faced issues where the project’s structure revolved around the styling language rather than what makes sense to a cartographer.

A good example of this was road layers. With Charites I had to have separate files for each layer, so I had separate files for each of the thirteen layers. With glug I was able to have one file for the twelve layers that drew the casings and fill, and one file for the road text layer. This kept related definitions in the same place, which makes everything more readable.

Expressions are essential for writing performant MapLibre GL styles. A simple expression example is filtering to only show labels of larger areas. A filter property such the one below does this.

{"filter":
[">=",
["get","way_area"],
['*', 750, 6126430366.1, ['^', 0.25, ["zoom"]]]
]}

This JSON doesn’t allow comments, so you have to hope it’s obvious from the text what is happening.[2]

Charites lets this be reformulated to YAML

filter:
  - '>='
  - [get, way_area]
  - ['*', 750, 6126430366.1, ['^', 0.25, [zoom]]] # Only show areas larger than 750 pixels at current zoom

It’s a bit better, but the comment shows a limitation of the language. Filtering by area is a very common task. It shouldn’t require a comment to explain the basic math. With glug this instead becomes

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OSM Accounts

same login:
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/User:XXX
https://community.openstreetmap.org/u/XXX

different login:
https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/XXX

Integrations:

Services

• Github
• Umap
• Facilmap
• Overpass
• Geojson.io

Desktop Applications

• josm
• gnome-maps

Android Applications

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Hi everyone, this is the update on the final phase of my project in adding transliteration support to Nominatim’s search results! A quick refresher: this project focused on adding transliteration as an option to users who did not understand the local language of a name, in which an understandable tag was not available.

Background

For background, you can check the overview of the project and the midterm report down below:

• Project Overview
• Midterm Report

The bulk of the work can be found in these pull requests:

• Locales and result class refactorization
• Locales documentation update (for refactored code)
• Transliteration integration

Detailed Report of the Project

The detailed version of the report can be read here (version pending Github Commit).

What I did

• Integrated transliteration into Nominatim so search results in unfamiliar scripts (e.g. 北京市) can be displayed in a user-readable form (e.g. Beijing).
• Built a pluggable transliteration framework supporting Latin script via unidecode, with prototypes for Cantonese, Simplified Chinese, and Traditional Chinese.
• Refactored the Locales class and results pipeline for clearer responsibilities, modularity, and maintainability.
• Introduced a languages.yaml configuration file for language normalization and country-language mapping.
• Implemented new logic for parsing browser language headers, including handling of ambiguous codes like zh.
• Wrote extensive unit tests and updated GitHub workflows for optional dependencies.
• Added documentation to explain the new localization and transliteration system.

Possible Next Steps

A summary of a few possible next steps are below:

• Improve regionalization (e.g. Hong Kong and Macau, which Nominatim does not yet recognize as independent from China).
• Refine fallback logic when multiple languages are present.
• Extend the non-Latin transliteration framework with more language-specific implementations.
• Expand testing for robustness and reliability.

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Hi everyone, this is the update on the final phase of my project in adding transliteration support to Nominatim’s search results! A quick refresher: this project focused on adding transliteration as an option to users who did not understand the local language of a name, in which an understandable tag was not available.

Background

For background, you can check the overview of the project and the midterm report down below:

• Project Overview
• Midterm Report

The bulk of the work can be found in these pull requests:

• Locales and result class refactorization
• Locales documentation update (for refactored code)
• Transliteration integration

Detailed Report of the Project

The detailed version of the report can be read here (version pending Github Commit).

What I did

• Integrated transliteration into Nominatim so search results in unfamiliar scripts (e.g. 北京市) can be displayed in a user-readable form (e.g. Beijing).
• Built a pluggable transliteration framework supporting Latin script via unidecode, with prototypes for Cantonese, Simplified Chinese, and Traditional Chinese.
• Refactored the Locales class and results pipeline for clearer responsibilities, modularity, and maintainability.
• Introduced a languages.yaml configuration file for language normalization and country-language mapping.
• Implemented new logic for parsing browser language headers, including handling of ambiguous codes like zh.
• Wrote extensive unit tests and updated GitHub workflows for optional dependencies.
• Added documentation to explain the new localization and transliteration system.

Possible Next Steps

A summary of a few possible next steps are below:

• Improve regionalization (e.g. Hong Kong and Macau, which Nominatim does not yet recognize as independent from China).
• Refine fallback logic when multiple languages are present.
• Extend the non-Latin transliteration framework with more language-specific implementations.
• Expand testing for robustness and reliability.

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Introduction

This report reflects on my journey during Google Summer of Code 2025, where I worked on the 3D Model Repository (3DMR): a platform that makes high-quality, CC-licensed 3D assets discoverable, reusable, and directly linkable to OpenStreetMap (OSM) features. At its core, 3DMR is about more than just hosting models: it’s about ensuring provenance, metadata quality, and renderer-friendly optimized delivery.

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Initial Project Goals

Details of my original proposal can be found here: OSM: Modernize the 3D Model Repository.

In essence, the goal of the project under GSoC 2025 was to revive the 3DMR project by upgrading Django and related dependencies and standardizing on the widely accepted glTF/GLB format so renderers can load models predictably.

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Work Done

My detailed progress notes are documented on the community thread. A high level summary of the major milestones can be highlighted as:

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OSM exists now since more than 20 years. During this time, a tagging scheme evolved. It has undergone several changes since, is partly approved by the community, but never anything was forced. The freedom to invent new tags is considered a strength of OSM.

The OSM tagging scheme is clearly a result of swarm intelligence, which is sometimes said to be superior. I wondered how well this worked and thus started to analyse it. I’ll probably blog about this in a loose series of blog posts, starting today with looking at the highway tag, which according to the wiki identifies “any kind of road, street or path.”

In most cases, OSM elements are categorised in a hierarchical manner, with every step narrowing the meaning of the former step: highway=service, service=driveway, driveway=garage for example. A top level type=highway is missing and has to be derived implicitly.¹

The values of a certain tag should ideally be choosen in a way, that there is a match for every object in the real world belonging to this category. And there should be only one match. So, a highway=service must not qualify for a highway=footway at the same time.

Restricting my study further, I choose to look only at values used for linear features, that is, way elements. There are about three dozen of common values in the database. They match the values listed at the wiki page.²

 

The Present: Criteria used for Highway Classification

When you are faced by a highway feature on the ground, which is not yet in the database, you have to decide about the value of the highway tag.

While it’s sometimes really easy to decide which value is correct, other situations lead to endless discussions in the forums. Such discussions are a hint that there is something wrong with these values. So I asked myself, by which criterion the values have been decided. As it turns out, there are severeal criteria in use, and they are mixed.

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I once walked past a small building, spotted that it’s got an address, and added it to OSM. Then I walked past it again, the building had its facade updated–and the address was nowhere to be seen.

We map a lot of ‘virtual’ objects in OpenStreetMap, boundaries and routes, but even addresses, the holy grail of survey, often end up virtual.

Take osm.org/way/1173366729: there isn’t an address on the building’s facade, yet 2GIS and Yandex.Maps have one.

Is there a private data agreement between the government and map services? 2GIS had some kind of city district polygons (elections related?) that someone even gave a review to asking what they were, and the Ministry of Information and/or of Digital Development already love giving out personal data of citizens to random software companies and banks in the name of ‘digitization’ (my bank’s app has everyone’s status with the police inspectorate and the psychoneurological dispensary and boldly let you see your own!), so it’s very likely.

P.S. The first building is on the cadastre, but there’s no building number, and the latter isn’t even on there at all :/ And don’t even ask whether one may copy from there.

I have noticed that the Apple mapping team, in their work within Kazakhstan, consistently mismapped various highway=* ways, for example:

• Mistagging of courtyard highways from highway=service to highway=residential.[2]
• Retagging of a highway=footway to a highway=residential, seemingly without any on-the-ground knowledge.[3][4]
• Various other bizarre additions or edits to service highways (also often mistagged), that I sometimes corrected or rolled back.[5]

If the Apple team does not have familiarity with how the highway tags are applied in a country[6] (a country here with a small OpenStreetMap community at that), or the specifics of urban development that span half the continent, then they, simply, should not map, and definitely not make the state of the map ever so slightly worse.

• [1] Betteridge’s law of headlines applies…
• [2] osm.org/way/458088367
• [3] osm.org/way/458088370 (both from the changeset 161673895)
• [4] Truly it isn’t a footway, as seen on Google Streetview, but may have been impassable for cars in the past!
• [5] Here, based entirely on my subjective idea that if there isn’t a curve in the highway area, then the highway centerline shouldn’t curve: osm.org/way/1192930242
• [6] There aren’t Kazakhstan-specific guidelines, but the Russian guidelines are applicable, where внутридворовые проезды (courtyard passages) are highway=service: osm.wiki/RU:Highway_classification

P.S. If anyone wants to fix the scary copy-pasted magically north-aligned square houses that were mapped all across the country, which previously, in part, made me register an alternative account and instead map pointless foreign stuff you’re welcome :P

UMAP OF THE ATTENDEES CITIES - III WORKSHOP ON PARTICIPATORY MAPPING AND SOCIAL CARTOGRAPHY - MPCS 2025

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– Portuguese below

We would like to thank the 462 participants from 151 cities in eight countries for taking part of our event!

Tomorrow, August 27th, 2025, at 2 p.m. (UTC-3), the program of lectures, mapping workshop with OpenStreetMap, mapathon, and the release of the book Case studies in collaborative and participatory mapping (book in portuguese).

Information and registration on the portal:

https://eventyay.com/e/b4950013

Follow the entire program 100% ONLINE and LIVE on the Virtual Institute for Sustainable Development channel - IVIDES.org on YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/@IVIDES

Event’s Chairwoman: Dr. Raquel Dezidério Souto (IVIDES and UFRJ, Brazil)

 

See the full map - Veja o mapa em tela cheia

Map Data (Dados do mapa) 2025 © OpenStreetMap Contributors. License.

 

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A few bike lanes were added in the part of town I live in (yay!) and I’d like to add them.

However, I’ve mostly been using these apps to map things: * everydoor * map complete website * go map !! (rarely)

I cant find any way in map compete to add bike lanes – they added on the street, so effectively making the space for the cars narrower. Is there any simple way of going about and adding these types of lanes?

Thanks!

I’d like to share a simple method I’ve devised to map unfamiliar areas outdoors. Suppose you’d like create a GPX track of a park under the following constraints:

• GPS data is inherently inaccurate, so you’d like to walk each path exactly twice to improve accuracy.
• You’d like to finish an the exact point you started.
• You’re in the field, so you want to keep things simple and not use something too complicated.

Since the diary does not allow posting GIFs, the full post is in the community forum.