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15/05/2025-21/05/2025
[1] Kamakura Tourist Congestion Map | © Kamakura | Map © OpenStreetMap Contributors.
About us
- Erratum: Last week we reported on the Panoramax activities of Arretche. Contrary to what was mistakenly linked, the river in question is not the L’Ardour, but the L’Adour. This section was documented by Arretche.
Mapping
- LordGarySugar has proposed removing the
railway=sitetag that is used to map historic stations and junctions in Great Britain, emphasising that such a tag should be used only for active railway features. - A request for comments has been made for the ‘Charging Stations v2‘ proposal. It proposes a revised and detailed structure for recording charging stations for electric vehicles in OSM, including a clear distinction between station, charging bay, and charging point as well as modern tagging options for plug types, power, and payment options. The aim is a consistent, future-proof mapping of current and future charging technologies, where relations are recommended, but simplified entry-level solutions are also still possible.
Mapping campaigns
- Oaxaca’s residents are mapping their public transport routes to demand better mobility.
- ivanbranco has reported
that the Italian community has reached a remarkable milestone. By mid-May 2025, more notes have been resolved than in any other full month in the past 12 years. Contributors are encouraged to maintain this momentum throughout the month to consolidate this record. - fserges reported that OpenStreetMap Russia’s ‘Validator for Settlements and Boundaries’ (atd.openstreetmap.ru ►) has successfully matched 99.5% of all settlements over nearly 12 years of work. With just a small fraction remaining, he called on the community to make a final push to bring the project to full completion.
that the Italian community has reached a remarkable milestone. By mid-May 2025, more notes have been resolved than in any other full month in the past 12 years. Contributors are encouraged to maintain this momentum throughout the month to consolidate this record.
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Community
- Andres Gomez Casanova has suggested transferring the ownership of the OpenStreetMap Welcome Mat website code repository from the OSMF GitHub account to the more active OSM GitHub account, which could attract more users to translate and improve the guidelines.
- Andrii Holovin has proposed adding Switch2OSM to an official OpenStreetMap subdomain.
- Rphyrin has shared his first experience with JOSM validation, reported how he has learned about a newly introduced bus route and mapped it on OSM, and explored identifying the most active OpenStreetMap contributors in a given city using the ‘Meet Your Mappers!’ tool.
OpenStreetMap Foundation
- Got a technical idea to enhance OpenStreetMap or support the OSM ecosystem? Now’s your chance to make it happen. The Engineering Working Group has officially opened applications for the 2025 Engineering Microgrants programme. With a total budget of £30,000 and funding of up to £6,000 per project, innovators are encouraged to apply before the mid-July 2025 deadline. Proposals must be submitted promptly via GitHub using the official template.
Events
- HeiGIT and Urban Big Data Centre are hosting a Joint Workshop on ‘Mapping with Communities’ at the GIScience conference 2025. The organisers are looking forward to submissions on participatory mapping and experiences engaging with communities. The deadline is Monday 30 June, for sending a extended abstract, up to 1500 words.
Education
- On Monday 19 May a training session was successfully held on post-disaster mapping with OpenStreetMap and JOSM, in Brazilian Portuguese, promoted by the IVIDES DATA ► company and the group of young Brazilian mappers, YouthMappers UFRJ (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil). The training session was given by Séverin Ménard, co-founder of Les Libres Géographes (France). You can access the recorded video and the files freely and map the project, helping Mayotte’s mapping effort.
►OSM research
- The Ballerup Municipality GIS Department has released a comparative analysis examining the differences in data coverage between GeoFA ► (a voluntary public geodata initiative in Denmark) and OpenStreetMap Denmark. The report emphasised that greater collaboration between public institutions and the OpenStreetMap Denmark community would lead to improved data quality and more efficient use of resources in the future.
- HeiGIT has reported that a new paper, published in Nature Scientific Data, presented the first high-resolution (10 m or finer) land use map of the European Union, derived from a large-scale fusion of OpenStreetMap (OSM) and Copernicus Sentinel-2 data. Leveraging citizen-generated data and remote sensing, the authors demonstrated a scalable and globally applicable methodology to fill thematic and spatial gaps in land use and land cover information.
a comparative analysis examining the differences in data coverage between Maps
- Sarah Hoffmann has announced updates to the rendering of
osmc:symbol, the machine-readable tag representing route symbols used on waymarkers and guideposts, on the Waymarked Trails platform. The changes bring the implementation closer to the specifications outlined on the OSM wiki, most notably with the addition of support for a second foreground symbol and an expanded set of supported background options. - Markus Weiland tooted the completion of the first version of a map that displays all structurally separated and paved bike paths in Saxony, based on data from OpenStreetMap.
the completion of the first version of a map that displays all structurally separated and paved bike paths in Saxony, based on data from OpenStreetMap.OSM in action
- ‘Koffie in De Zon‘ leverages detailed building data from OpenStreetMap to simulate real-time sunlight and shadow patterns. This map allows users to instantly see which coffee spots are basking in the sun and which are tucked away in the shade.
- Fedir Gontsa shared details of a 2024 project in which he designed limited edition drip coffee packaging for Cherkasy, Ukraine, using map data from OpenStreetMap and his own cartographic reconstructions of the Dnipro riverbed. The project was a collaboration between local media outlet 18000, coffee roasters AboutCoffee, and the design team, with maps serving as the central visual element. Proceeds from the coffee sales are directed toward fundraising for equipment for members of the Ukrainian Armed Forces from Cherkasy.
leverages detailed building data from OpenStreetMap to simulate real-time sunlight and shadow patterns. This map allows users to instantly see which coffee spots are basking in the sun and which are tucked away in the shade.Software
- HeiGIT has taken a closer look at their Climate Action Navigator (CAN) (we reported earlier). CAN offers insights for whole neighbourhoods and across multiple dimensions of urban climate action by providing several tools for targeted climate action: hiWalk (walkability), hiBike (bikeability), and Heating Emissions (CO₂ emissions from residential heating), for example. You can join HeiGIT on Thursday 5 June to learn more about the full potential of CAN.
- Swann Vichot, of JawgMaps, has compared two open-source web mapping libraries, MapLibre GL JS and Leaflet, highlighting that MapLibre GL JS is better suited for complex, feature-rich maps and data visualisation, while Leaflet excels at simpler maps with minimal interactivity.
- Sean Gorman is working to enhance the accuracy of POI location data in the Overture dataset, by leveraging Mapillary street level imagery and transformer-based vision-language AI models.
Programming
- A leader of the rescue group ONE TOHOKU ► asked his friend Tarosuke, a former firefighter with rescue experience, to develop ► the ‘Disaster Response Team Management System’ app. The result uses React-Leaflet and OpenStreetMap data to enable team leaders to track members’ locations and share disaster updates in real time.
►Did you know that …
- … Esri’s World Imagery has been available in iD since August 2017? The tiles are jointly contributed by various ‘World Imagery Map’ providers, including Maxar, Earthstar Geographics, and a range of government institutions.
- … there’s a potato monument in Boston commemorating the Millers River potato sheds, where residents of the Charlestown neighbourhood regularly came to purchase their weekly supplies? The potato storage sheds burned down in the mid-1930s and were never replaced, but Andy Woodruff discovered the monument and turned it into a viral tweet in 2017. The inscription on the monument included a piece of concrete poetry about potatoes, but due to technical limitations of OpenStreetMap’s software, only the first 255 characters could be included in its
inscription=*tag. - [1]… the City of Kamakura has developed ► the ‘Kamakura Tourist Congestion Map’? This is an OpenStreetMap-based interactive map that allows users to check an overview of tourist sites in Kamakura, along with their current congestion status.
OSM in the media
- Maja Aralica, of Abendzeitung, has explained ► the concept of ‘critical cartography’, a field of study that questions the dominant world views embedded in maps by making some things visible and others invisible – to the extent that users may not even realise what they’re missing or what’s not being offered to them.
Other “geo” things
- Yujun Hou and Filip Biljecki have published a comprehensive framework for evaluating the quality of street-level imagery, which includes 48 different quality criteria and is also applicable to other types of images. The framework takes into account both technical and content-related aspects such as image resolution, timeliness, coverage, and distortion to enable a systematic and comparable assessment. The aim is to improve the use and analysis of street-level imagery in various application areas such as urban planning, navigation and research. Greg Cocks has summarised the article on Mastodon.
- Matt Growcoot, of PetaPixel, reported that roof-mounted lidar sensors, used for mapping a vehicle’s surroundings, can damage smartphone cameras because their infrared lasers can harm certain camera devices. This kind of lidar sensor is installed on some types of cars and might pose a risk to photo-mapping activities.
- Stefan Kaufmann argued ► that linked open data provides an effective approach to managing address information, by capturing its inherent interconnected structure and handling cases where multiple street name variants refer to the same location.
Upcoming Events
| Country | Where | What | Online | When |
|---|---|---|---|---|
 | Milano | Facciamo Luce — Field Mapping #1  | 2025-05-26 | |
 | Saint-Étienne | Rencontre Saint-Étienne et sud Loire | 2025-05-26 | |
 | Stadtgebiet Bremen | Bremer Mappertreffen | 2025-05-26 | |
 | San Jose | South Bay Map Night | ✓ | 2025-05-28 |
| Milano | Facciamo Luce — Field Mapping #2 | 2025-05-28 | |
| Düsseldorf | Düsseldorfer OpenStreetMap-Treffen (online) | 2025-05-28 | |
| [Online] OpenStreetMap Foundation board of Directors — public videomeeting | 2025-05-29 | |||
 | Madrid | Mappy Hour OSM España | ✓ | 2025-05-29 |
 | София | OpenStreetMap Mapathon — Let’s map the world together! | 2025-05-29 | |
| UN Mappers Mappy Hour: Community Discussion | 2025-05-30 | |||
| OSMF Engineering Working Group meeting | 2025-05-30 | |||
| OSM World Mappy Hour | 2025-05-30 | |||
 | Chanakya Puri Tehsil | 17th OSM Delhi Mapping Party (Online) | 2025-06-01 | |
| Heidelberg | Rhein-Neckar OpenstreetMap Treffen | 2025-06-02 | |
 | Salzburg | OSM Treffen Salzburg | 2025-06-03 | |
| Missing Maps London: (Online) Mapathon [eng] | 2025-06-03 | |||
| Stuttgart | Stuttgarter OpenStreetMap-Treffen | 2025-06-04 | |
| iD Community Chat | 2025-06-04 | |||
 | Brno | Kvartální OSM pivo | 2025-06-04 | |
| OSM Indoor Meetup | 2025-06-04 | |||
| Augustusburg | Kartenwerkstatt Augustusburg | 2025-06-07 | |
 | København | OSMmapperCPH | 2025-06-08 | |
| Chanakya Puri Tehsil | 17th OSM Delhi Mapping Party | 2025-06-08 | |
 | 中正區 | OpenStreetMap x Wikidata Taipei #77 | 2025-06-09 |
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 HeiGIT, MatthiasMatthias, Raquel Dezidério Souto, SeverinGeo, Strubbl, TheSwavu, andygol, barefootstache, derFred.
We welcome link suggestions for the next issue via this form and look forward to your contributions.