Hello OSM community,

My name is Nicole and I’m on the governance team at MapSwipe a humanitarian mobile phone app and web app where volunteers can contribute to geospatial data projects.

I presented a talk, “MapSwipe Today and Its Future in OSM” at State of the Map US 2025 in June in Boston, Massachusetts. The talk had two main purposes:

1. Let people know more about MapSwipe, its history, and what it can do with it today

2. Begin a discussion within the OSM community about what it might mean for MapSwipe to become its own OSM editor, especially if AI or machine learning models are involved.

You can view the talk on YouTube.

The MapSwipe community wants to ensure that if we are going to move forward with any ideas and planning around becoming an editor that has any AI in the mix, that we also make sure the OSM community is present in our discussions.

This diary post is to collect thoughts from the OSM community on this topic.

Some items we’d like to discuss with the OSM community are:

• Are there legitimate uses of AI in mapping? And can MapSwipe use it ethically?
• Would MapSwipe be a great beginner editor for newbies to OSM?
• Would folks use MapSwipe as a map editor?
• Is there anything else should we consider?

Looking forward to the discussion!

Nicolelaine

I’ve been working on a project for a few months now, and keep getting stuck with time out errors from the Overpass API, which I think might be due to the fact that there are so many postboxes and post offices in the world. (Maybe?)

**Background on the project and ideal vision:

I’m helping the guy who runs postcrossing.com (a free website where people from all over can pull an address and send and receive postcards from each other) to build a map where people can easily find the postbox or post office closest to them in order to mail their postcards. This could be especially helpful if people are on holiday or not close to home and are not super aware of the postboxes and post offices in the area. This would be a map that is embedded in a website - there is no app yet for postcrossing.com and does not seem like there will be on in the near future.

I want the postboxes and post offices to be on different layers, so that I can style the icons individually.

The map should be easy to understand and ideally, would also offer the option to edit if need be (i.e add a postbox or post office that does not yet exist on the map, and be able to add opening hours for the post offices and collection times for the postboxes. There would also be the option to add a photo of the postbox or post office.

**Progress thus far:

I began this project using the Overpass API and putting that information into a uMap, which you can find here: http://u.osmfr.org/m/528331/

I set up the cache under remote data to be once a day, but I still get a red error message that says, “problem in the response,” and gets a 429 error in the console when I move about the map.

I first wrote an OSM Diary entry about this project here: osm.org/user/Nicolelaine/diary/396957

Someone suggested that I create a bounding box, following this French tutorial here: https://wiki.cartocite.fr/doku.php?id=umap:10_-_je_valorise_les_donnees_openstreetmap_avec_umap

… See full entry

Larger End Goal: To have a map embedded within an app or a website where people are able to easily view where the nearest postbox or post office is, and also be able to add new post offices and postboxes to the map if they aren’t yet recorded in the map.

Step 1: Display both post offices and post boxes on a uMap, using the Overpass API. These items should be on two separate layers, as the icons need to be styled differently.

Current issue: There are lots of post offices in the world, and even more postboxes. This causes the uMap to time out with a 429 error of “problem in the response.”

The current map: http://umap.openstreetmap.fr/en/map/postboxes_528331#13/53.5705/10.0067

Current suggestions:

• Use an alternative public instance: osm.wiki/Overpass_API#Public_Overpass_API_instances
• Run an Overpass API instance locally (really seems to be overkill for what’s needed for this project
• Download the information of all post_box’s and post_office’s points and store that locally. Not sure what would be the best way to do this though. It looks like you can download all the OS data following the instructions here, but 1.5TB is a bit much to handle.
• Maybe use the Overpass API itself to download the data (perhaps in chunks), although it seems we either already reached some limit or it is perhaps already overloaded and we don’t want to make it worse unless we’re sure it’s ok.

Current Questions:

• What is the best way to get all (amenity=post_box OR amenity=post_office) points from OSM without overloading anyone or downloading the whole OSM dataset?
• If we do go the route of downloading a copy of the data and querying this locally, what is the best way to get a snapshot of the relevant points from OSM without us causing unwelcome load to someone’s server?

What we hope for:

… See full entry