weeklyOSM 810

22/01/2026-28/01/2026

Mapping campaigns

• AE35 reported that 22 volunteers participated in MapRoulette challenges across Denmark’s five regions, resulting in a total of 71,251 brand-new roads and paths added to Denmark.
• Jonny McCullagh announced that a mapathon will take place in Belfast on Saturday 21 February from 11:00 to 13:00. The event is limited to 30 participants, with registration available via the provided sign-up link.

Community

• The uMap project has improved its online guide, Documentation utilisateur·ice uMap, but is asking for help to translate the content of the tutorials into English, with the aim of reaching more users. You can create an issue in GitHub and explain that you are a candidate to do this.
• Higashimado has published ► the 2025 Mainland China Township OSM Element Completeness Analysis Report, which shows the distribution of OpenStreetMap element completeness across townships in 31 provinces, autonomous regions, and municipalities in mainland China.
• JB Charron highlighted ► the renewed interest within the OpenStreetMap France community in mapping and maintaining business-related points of interest, including shopping centres and commercial zones.
• Anne-Karoline Distel showed how to split a building polygon with perfect right angles in JOSM.
• After substantial review on the OSM Community forum, Penegal has asked for more comments about his updated proposal of a tagging scheme for mapping advance restriction signage (pictograms or text signs) on destination signs.
• Nicole Siggins and Amar Shahi, from the MapSwipe Governance Team, got together to discuss and celebrate MapSwipe’s major achievements over 2025, as well as to chat about what’s next for the Image detection tool.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

• Grant Slater, Senior Site Reliability Engineer at OpenStreetMap, reported that more than 100,000 IP addresses operating over proxy and embedded SDK networks were involved in a coordinated attempt by AI robots to scrape OpenStreetMap data this week, with each IP making only a small number of requests. Eva-Maria Weiß, from heise online, contacted Grant Slater and published a longer report.
• The OpenStreetMap Operations Team reported that they have temporarily blocked new OpenStreetMap account registrations originating from the Tor network, following sustained abuse by a malicious actor.

Events

• The first ever SotM India has taken place in Nashik alongside the FOSS4G Asia 2026 conference. Presentations and recordings are in the process of being uploaded.

Maps

• [1] Tim Brookes explained how to create your own fancy wall art city maps using MapToPoster and OpenStreetMap data.
• Alan McConchie reported that Nathan generated a full set of Bellingham, Washington maps using the City Map Poster Generator, a Python script that generates minimalist map posters using OpenStreetMap data.
• Using her osm-lump-ways tool, Amanda McCann has shown that OpenStreetMap has relatively good coverage of road surface data across Ireland.
• The Mountains Recreation and Conservation Authority (MRCA, California, USA), a local public agency dedicated to the preservation and management of local open space and parkland, wildlife habitat, coastal access, watershed lands, and trails in both wilderness and urban settings, has published ‘MRCA-Managed Parks’, an interactive web map based on OpenStreetMap and Mapbox, showing the recreation parks and other areas of interest.

OSM in action

• In response to Storm Kristin, which recently hit Portugal, Jeremias has developed Apoio Mútuo, based on the collaborative platform apoiomutuo.pt and OpenStreetMap data, in order to map storm support initiatives, requests for assistance, and community aid points. You can create an account and contribute to this effort.
• Martin Brodbeck, of GNU/Linux.ch, explained ► how to plan an excursion using QMapShack, an open-source desktop application for route planning, together with Freizeitkarte, vector-based offline maps derived from OpenStreetMap data.
• The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has launched a ‘Snowfall Reports from the Last 24 Hours’ web dashboard, built on an OpenStreetMap basemap.
• Alexander Sinyavsky has urged the mappers of Perm, recognised as the greenest city in Russia, to remember to add greenery and footways paths, as OSM data is used as the basis for the city’s public transportation stop maps. However, chat participants noted that OSM attribution is not being respected. Alexander passed on this comment and reported that the new maps now include OSM attribution.

Software

• MapLibre has announced MapLibre Tile (MLT), a new modern and efficient vector tile format. MLT is intended to be a successor to Mapbox Vector Tile.
• Ellen Poe has developed Cardinal Maps, an Android navigation application built using data from OpenStreetMap.
• fghj753 shared their weekend project building a web-based app to quickly log GNSS coordinates for later OpenStreetMap editing; while technically functional, the prototype revealed issues including GNSS caching, ambiguous data, and challenges in post-processing and mapping.
• The latest release of ohsome-planet has introduced Parquet files continuously derived from OpenStreetMap replication data. This eliminates costly reprocessing and allows seamless analysis of the full lifecycle of OSM data in near real time.
• You can now turn GeoPDFs into interactive maps with MapTiler and try the new dark mode for their OpenStreetMap basemap.
• Glad_torsk is seeking a tool to help add Wikipedia links to OSM objects. OWL Map was suggested as a successor to the unmaintained OSM Wikidata Matcher.

Programming

• Kyle Walker has written, in the Walker Data blog, about the support available in mapgl 0.4.4 to generate interactive map legends, which can be categorical or continuous.
• Matt has published an analysis of the WordPress mapping plugins, highlighting some that use OSM data.

Releases

• CoMaps released version 2026.01.24, which brings fresh OSM data and improves the display of roads, among many other features and fixes.
• Michael Reichert reported that Geofabrik has just added a new view to OSM Inspector that renders postal code boundaries (postal_code=* polygons).

Did you know that …

• … the MapServer User Conference 2003 laid the foundation for today’s FOSSGIS conference?
• … you can easily extract administrative boundaries, such as country, state and regional borders or equivalents, from OpenStreetMap using OSM-Boundaries?

OSM in the media

• Amid recent US threats toward Greenland, anti-American sentiment targeting big tech companies is growing ► in Denmark, prompting the Danish national broadcaster DR to recommend ► OpenStreetMap-based map apps alternatives such as CoMaps and OsmAnd.

Other “geo” things

• The European Geoscience Union has launched Earth Observation, a new scientific journal with open access, dedicated to the discussion and publication of studies and original research on Earth observation technologies and methods.
• Miguel García Álvarez has published, in their A Cartographer’s Tale blog, about the world regions which rose above sea level during the last glacial maximum.
• Indonesia’s National Agency for Border Management reported that a shift in the Indonesia–Malaysia border has resulted in three villages in Nunukan Regency now being designated as part of Malaysia’s administrative region.

Upcoming Events

Country	Where	Venue	What	When
			[Online] OpenStreetMap Foundation board of Directors – public videomeeting	2026-01-29
	Amsterdam	TomTom HQ Amsterdam	2026 Kickoff Meetup – Mapping, Fireside Chats, Show & Tell, and More!	2026-01-29
			Mapping USA 2026	2026-01-30 – 2026-01-31
	València	Las Naves	“OpenStreetMap: un mapa para todas”, dentro de la “Tarde de soberanía tecnológica”	2026-01-30
	Gent	Sporewegel 1	OpenStreetMap meetup in Gent	2026-01-30
	Aosta / Aoste	Museo archeologico regionale	Compleanno di Wikipedia e mapping party ad Aosta @ Fiera di Sant’Orso	2026-01-31
	Mumbai	Churchgate (approximate location)	OSM Mumbai Mapping Party No.6 (Mumbai City)	2026-01-31
	नई दिल्ली	Jitsi Meet (online)	OSM India – Monthly Online Mapathon	2026-02-01
		EPN d’Arlon, rue de Diekirch 37, Arlon	EPN d’Arlon – OpenStreetMap – Découverte	2026-02-03
	Santa Clara	Santa Clara University	Lucy Lamoureux	2026-02-03
	Santa Clara	Santa Clara University	Lucy Lamoureux	2026-02-03
	Lille	Salle Yser, MRES, Lille	Rencontre OSM des contributeurs autour de Lille	2026-02-03
	Essen	Verkehrs- und Umweltzentrum	Essen OSM-Treffen	2026-02-03
			Missing Maps London: (Online) Mapathon [eng]	2026-02-03
	Marseille	Espace Villeneuve Bargemon	Marseille à la carte !	2026-02-04
			iD Community Chat	2026-02-04
	City of Westminster	Greene Man pub	London OpenStreetMap meet-up	2026-02-04
	Stuttgart	Stuttgart	Stuttgarter OpenStreetMap-Treffen	2026-02-04
		Le Schmilblick, Montrouge	Réunion des contributeurs de Montrouge et du Sud de Paris	2026-02-05
	Montpellier	La Base	Mapathon OSM à La Base : cartographier Haïti pour la prévention des risques ​	2026-02-05
	Freiburg im Breisgau	CCCFR	OSM-Treffen Freiburg/Brsg.	2026-02-05
			OSMF Engineering Working Group meeting	2026-02-06
	Braunschweig	Stratum 0	Braunschweiger Mappertreffen im Stratum 0 Hackerspace	2026-02-07
	København	Cafe Bevar’s	OSMmapperCPH	2026-02-08
			Missing Maps : Mapathon en ligne – CartONG [fr]	2026-02-09
	臺北市	MozSpace Taipei	OpenStreetMap x Wikidata Taipei #85	2026-02-09
		EPN d’Arlon, rue de Diekirch 37, Arlon	EPN d’Arlon – OpenStreetMap – Utilisation	2026-02-10
	Hamburg	Voraussichtlich: “Variable”, Karolinenstraße 23	Hamburger Mappertreffen	2026-02-10
	Zürich	Bitwäscherei Zürich	184. OSM-Stammtisch Zürich	2026-02-11
	Wien	Schlupfwinkel (Kleine Neugasse 10, 1040 Wien)	77. Wiener OSM-Stammtisch	2026-02-11
			Online Mapathon von ÄRZTE OHNE GRENZEN	2026-02-11
	München	Echardinger Einkehr	Münchner OSM-Treffen	2026-02-11
	Seattle	1215 E Columbia St, Seattle, WA 98122, US	Olympia, Connected	2026-02-12
			UN Mappers: Validation Training	2026-02-13
	Delhi		ILUGD Meetup × OSM Delhi Mapping Party No.26 (North Zone)	2026-02-15

Note:
If you like to see your event here, please put it into the OSM calendar. Only data which is there, will appear in weeklyOSM.

This weeklyOSM was produced by MatthiasMatthias, PierZen, Raquel Dezidério Souto, Strubbl, Supaplex, Andrew Davidson, derFred, mcliquid.
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