30/01/2025-05/02/2025
[1] An interactive air quality map for Kigali, Rwanda. © Open Seneca | © Mapbox | Map data © OpenStreetMap Contributors.
Mapping
- Requests for comments have been made on this proposal:
traffic_sign:id=*
to explicitly reference official traffic sign identifiers, improving data accuracy and interoperability with external databases.
Mapping campaigns
- AE35 has announced
that OpenStreetMap Denmark’s Mapping Project of the Month for February 2025 will focus on bench mapping. To support participants, 15 grants of 100 DKK are available for refreshments on a first-come, first-served basis. To claim a grant, mappers can email soren DOT johannessen AT gmail DOT com with their MobilePay number and OpenStreetMap username.
- After five years of work, OSM mapper Ottwiz has completed mapping West Virginia’s forest landcover and is now shifting focus to Pennsylvania.
Community
- YouthMappers UFRJ Chapter (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) highlighted their main achievements since its creation and extended an invitation to participate with its vibrant mapper community.
- Anne-Karoline Distel recapped her mapping contributions made while touring the Netherlands with a band (we reported earlier). Using a GoPro Max, she captured 360° imagery along motorways and concert venues, significantly improving the coverage on Panoramax. She also mapped thatched buildings, defibrillators, and backstage amenities in theatres, adding missing shops, streetlights, and other details. Despite the limited daylight, Anne-Karoline ranked number 56 in Dutch OSM contributions.
- Anne-Karoline also announced that the OpenStreetMap Ireland community has successfully completed the Dundalk mapping project.
Local chapter news
Events
- You can participate in the selection of a SotM LatAm2025 logo by participating in the OSM Community forum survey before Wednesday 12 February.
Education
- Emilie Lerigoleur, from the Géographie de l’Environnement research group at the Université de Toulouse II (France), highlighted
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the potential of uMap in the training of geographers and the visualisation of scientific data. You can access some learning resources and start to map with uMap.
OSM research
- Zhang and other authors published a paper in the International Journal of Digital Earth, tracking individual OSM mappers’ trajectories of editing behaviour. The paper concluded that OSM has been self-sustaining so far and does not yet show any signs of decline, along with the finding that most contributors transition to a higher career stage within a month, a conclusion that may cause more than one raised eyebrow.
- Scholz and other authors have written a paper on investigating the potential of using OpenStreetMap data to understand exposure and vulnerabilities to climate-related hazards of Sudan’s most vulnerable populations, such as internally displaced persons or refugees displaced by violent conflict.
Maps
- Cayenne has tooted
a map illustrating the percentage of fibre to the home eligibility coverage by department in metropolitan France for the third quarter of 2024. The map was created using QGIS, combining data from ARCEP, France’s telecommunications and postal regulator, with a basemap from OpenStreetMap.
- The eu citizen science has an interactive map, developed using OSM, Mapbox and Leaflet, showing research groups and related citizen science initiatives around the world.
- You can see an interesting uMap, created by Alan Grunitzki, showing Xanxerê City’s (Santa Catarina, Brazil) emergency escape routes.
- The United Nations office in Brazil has created
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a map showing its initiatives related to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals and Agenda 2030, using OpenStreetMap data, Mapbox and Leaflet, a powerful JavaScript Library for web map interactivity.
OSM in action
- [1] Open Seneca has launched an interactive air quality map for Kigali, Rwanda, providing a visual representation of air pollution levels across the city, with OpenStreetMap data as its basemap. The data was gathered in 2021 through a network of 16 sensors mounted on electric delivery motorbikes, capturing pollution levels during their daily travels.
Software
- The Agence Nationale de la cohésion des territoires has published
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a newsletter describing the advances in using uMap (OSM-fr tool) in the development of a map tool for the French administration. You can also access
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a website to explore the maps generated by the community.
- HeiGIT has recently expanded the ohsome Quality API and its dashboard, adding a new indicator to assess attribute completeness in OpenStreetMap and introducing major upgrades to the functionalities of this Indicator:
- Multi-Attribute Queries: Assess the completeness of multiple attributes simultaneously, such as comprehensive address information.
- Custom Attribute Filters: Define complex key-value combinations using and/or logic for more advanced data analysis.
The code is available on GitHub.
Programming
- Savaş Altürk published on using Panel, DuckDB, and MapLibre for data analytics.
- The OpenStreetMap Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2025 committee is seeking project ideas and mentors for this year’s event. GSoC provides stipends for students and new open-source contributors to develop OSM-related software. Interested mentors and project contributors can submit their ideas on the OSM Wiki.
- Along with the usual charts, the Plotly library lets you create interactive maps with OSM. The open source graphing library is available for both Python and Javascript and has moved from Mapbox to Maplibre as the rendering engine, while still providing various OSM styles. There is also a tutorial that shows how to render OpenStreetMap tile layers using the Maplibre library.
Releases
- Version 1.5.1 of Baba for Android has been released. It is used to contribute to the Panoramax project and new features include the resumption of recordings interrupted by calls and setting the image orientation.
- Yohan Boniface listed the improvements made to the user experience in the pre-release version of uMap (2.9.0b0).
- TrickyFoxy outlined the new features of their better-osm-org browser userscript, for adding additional functionality to the OpenStreetMap website. This update implements the display of photos associated with StreetComplete notes, and the
panoramax=*
andwikimedia_commons=*
tags. Also added are the display of users’ GPS tracks on the map and when opening notes from StreetComplete. The changesets history page now displays the first comment to a changeset. You can read about the other functions of the script in their other diary entries.
Did you know that …
- … OSM has a feature to allow you to follow other mappers’ edits? The edits of the mappers you are following will appear as a list in your OSM user dashboard.
- … there is a Wiki OSM page that lists some websites and services that use OpenStreetMap, clustered by countries, companies and thematic categories? And that you can help to improve it?
OSM in the media
- The Sydney Morning Herald has highlighted Jake Coppinger’s Better Intersections project (we reported earlier) in a recent article on pedestrian-friendly traffic reforms. Anthony Segaert’s article notes that the push for improved walking spaces gained momentum in 2023 when Coppinger began crowdsourcing a survey to identify the local intersections with the longest pedestrian wait times.
- Les Petites Affiches has published
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an article about OSM, highlighting its advantages and collaborative nature.
Other “geo” things
- Pablo Sanxiao has written [gl] Fina e os mapas, a children’s book about cartography and collaborative maps, with OpenStreetMap being mentioned as an example. The book, currently available in Galician and Spanish, can be translated into other languages from its GitHub repository.
- PetaPixel reported on safety concerns surrounding GeoSpy, an AI tool capable of pinpointing a photo’s location by analysing its visual elements.
Upcoming Events
Note:
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This weeklyOSM was produced by MarcoR, PierZen, Raquel Dezidério Souto, Strubbl, TheSwavu, barefootstache, mcliquid.
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