A request for comments has been made for the mtb:scale:amtb=* proposal. It proposes a tagging scheme to classify mountain biking trails’ suitability for adaptive mountain biking (AMTB), considering the specific needs of riders with mobility impairments. This scale extends the existing mtb:scale with additional attributes focusing on trail width, surface, gradient, and obstacles.
Mapping campaigns
Swiggy (an online food delivery service) and Ola (a ride-hailing service) are currently conducting organised editing in OpenStreetMap across India.
Community
On Monday 20 January, Donald Trump, once again president of the USA, signed an executive order mandating that US federal agencies rename the northern half of the Gulf of Mexico to the ‘Gulf of America’ on all US federal maps and documents. In response, various reactions followed on the OSM community and the Mastodon en.osm.town instance that recall how OSM handles naming disputes.
InfosReseaux talked about how OpenStreetMap is helping with managing power grid assets. Accurate tagging and open data are really important in adapting grids to climate challenges. The post mentioned advanced tagging systems, tools like StreetComplete and Osmose, and how they work together with operators like Enedis. It also talks about what the French community has achieved, like reviewing 255,000 transmission towers, improving how power lines are described, and using AI and LiDAR to make improvements.
OpenCage is planning to restart their long-running interview series with OSM communities around the world. For the first edition, they decided to interview Amanda McCann, long-term OSM stalwart and the creator of WaterwayMap, a map of waterways from OpenStreetMap.
Thomas Froitzheim, at the ‘Nature.Tourism.Future’ symposium
Anne-Karoline Distel, a violinist in ‘The Dubliners Experience’ band, is touring the Netherlands, capturing street-level images, and uploading them to Panoramax.
Events
Emilio Mariscal from HOT is set to host a webinar, ‘Open Mapping with ChatMap’, on Thursday 30 January at 12:00 UTC in English. The event will explore groundbreaking ways to leverage WhatsApp, Telegram, and Signal for open mapping initiatives. Registration is now open here.
The State of the Map LATAM► 2025 Organising Committee is calling► for logo designs that represent OpenStreetMap, the State of the Map conference, and the spirit of Medellín, Colombia, the event’s host city. Designs must be original, recognisable, and open-licensed (CC BY SA). Submissions are due by Monday 3 February and the winner will receive SotM LatAm 2025 merchandise and recognition on the official event website.
Maps
1 Drew Roos has developed MERCATOR:EXTREME, an interactive web map that displays the Mercator projection and its distortions near the poles. However, you can substitute any point on Earth as the pole, highlighting Mercator’s shortcomings in accurately visualising areas near the poles.
Historically there has been a bit of an issue with golf-course mappers using odd geometries for courses partly because some of the software that uses OSM data as a source for golf games, for example PGA Tour 2k23, didn’t understand some OSM constructs such as multipolygons. However, it sounds from a changeset comment like this issue might have been resolved and hopefully we’ll see fewer ‘odd geometries’ in the future.
Sven Geggus described improvements to the OpenStreetMap tile servers for rendering maps with localised names. This is done by adapting openstreetmap-carto-flex-l10n.lua and using the osml10n tool during the database import, which can allow users to achieve localisation in languages such as English, French, or Spanish.
OSM in action
Secret Melbourneshowcased ‘City of Melbourne Cool Routes’, an interactive map that shows streets and spaces that are relatively cooler, helping you plan safe and comfortable journeys through the City of Melbourne.
Software
AED Map allows► you to browse for nearby AED defibrillators on a map, providing first aiders quick access to this critical information. The code is available on GitHub.
Graphmasters specialises in real-time traffic solutions, providing dynamic navigation and route optimisation technologies. Its software addresses urban congestion, fleet management, and logistics challenges by integrating AI and real-time data. Its NUNAV routing engine utilises up-to-date data from OpenStreetMap across all its products.
HeiGIT tooted some metrics, made using ohsome, about contributions made to OpenStreetMap in 2024, describing the scale of OSM use and demonstrating the analytical capabilities of ohsome.
Digvijay Kumar highlighted Organic Maps as a privacy-focused open-source alternative to Google Maps built on OpenStreetMap data. It offers offline navigation, detailed maps, hiking and cycling routes, contour lines, and voice guidance, without ads or tracking.
KartaVoice is a web-based app that makes it easy to collect points of interest using AI, voice commands, and your device’s camera. It captures precise locations, estimates distances, and enables updates such as adding addresses. This streamlined process makes data collection faster than traditional manual methods.
A new round trip function for BRouter has been proposed, adding customisable parameters for starting direction, round-trip distance, and route behaviours like allowing the same path for return trips. This feature enables users to generate tailored circular routes, improving flexibility for navigation and routing tasks.
OwnTracks is an open source application for tracking your location privately and securely. It allows users to create a personal location journal or share their location with friends and family using open protocols. The application works with existing servers or self-hosted setups to ensure privacy.
Programming
Ilya Zverev is trying to improve EveryDoor by developing a process for uploading photos from mobile to Panoramax and asked about the OAuth authentication process.
Releases
Vespucci hinted at the addition of Panoramax support as a new feature in their upcoming version 21.0 release.
Did you know that …
… that the theoretical limit for the OSM object ID value is 9,223,372,036,854,775,807?
… that the German-style tile server offers a Latin-script rendering for place names? This contrasts with the default OSM standard tile layer, which prefers to show place names in the non-Latin scripts used by locals.
Other “geo” things
You can use► ‘Layer Color’, a QGIS plugin, to adjust the background colours of layers and groups in the layer window, in order to make the layer structure clearer and more structured, solely through improved optical differentiation.
Wille Marcel and Lane Goodman have shared some insights on visualising NASA’s polar geospatial data using 3D mapping libraries such as deck.gl, MapLibre, and Mapbox Globe View. Their blog highlighted challenges with the Mercator projection near the poles and the process of refining tools for the CASEI platform to enable accurate data representation across polar regions. Open source solutions and experiments with Globe View visualisation were detailed to improve geospatial workflows.
Upcoming Events
Where
What
Online
When
Country
Chambéry
Mapathon en ligne saison 24/25 CartONG
2025-01-27
Saint-Étienne
Rencontre Saint-Étienne et sud Loire
2025-01-27
Stadtgebiet Bremen
Bremer Mappertreffen
2025-01-27
City of Edinburgh
Geomob Edinburgh
2025-01-28
Београд
Srbija OpenStreetMap okupljanje
2025-01-28
Berlin
OSM-Verkehrswende #65
✓
2025-01-28
MapRVA Map & Yap
2025-01-30
Zagreb
OSM-HR Meetup (Zagreb)
2025-01-29
Düsseldorf
Düsseldorfer OpenStreetMap-Treffen (online)
2025-01-29
Ugíjar
Mapas y Tapas – Mapping Party!
2025-01-30
London Borough of Islington
GeoMob London
2025-01-30
Salt Lake City
OSM Utah Monthly Map Night
2025-02-05
Salzburg
OSM Treffen Salzburg
2025-02-04
San Jose
South Bay Map Night
✓
2025-02-05
Missing Maps London: (Online) Mapathon [eng]
2025-02-04
Stuttgart
Stuttgarter OpenStreetMap-Treffen
2025-02-05
iD Community Chat
2025-02-05
Montrouge
Réunion des contributeurs de Montrouge et du Sud de Paris
2025-02-06
Guadalajara
A Synesthete’s Atlas: Cartographic Improvisations between Eric Theise and Fernando Feria
2025-02-07
OSMF Engineering Working Group meeting
2025-02-07
中正區
OpenStreetMap x Wikidata Taipei #73
2025-02-10
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.
Since the German l10n tools are mentioned here twice, it’s worth noting the inherent limitations to the underlying transliteration software: because OSM does not explicitly indicate the language of the value in the name=* key, the transliterator cannot choose a transliteration scheme appropriate to that original language. Instead, it falls back to a language-agnostic transliteration scheme that’s only designed for collation, not display. Essentially, the transliterator detects the writing system and assumes a particular language, such as Russian for all Cyrillic text, Standard Arabic for all Arabic text, and Mandarin Chinese for all Chinese and Japanese text.
The upshot is that, if you use this tool for displaying labels on a world map, you can expect almost every label in Ukraine, Iran, Pakistan, or Japan to be wrong or even politically offensive. A developer might decide that showing something misleading is better than showing something completely unreadable, but they should be aware of the implications.
Sorry, I was writing from (false) memory when I first replied; but at the time I’m writing this, that reply has not made it through moderation anyway. (In the preview after submitting, my paragraph breaks looked broken; I don’t know if that caused a rejection.) I have since had the opportunity to quickly check and compare OSM’s German style with OSM’s default style on a more robust system.
Minh Nguyễn is right: If you use the German style and zoom in on China, Taiwan, or Japan, you see (pseudo*) Hanyu Pinyin everywhere. Which is a nice feature for Chinese places, whereas for Japanese places it’s mostly useless and possibly misleading clutter.
So, OSM default style displays all “CJK Unified Ideographs” (to use Unicode terminology, however inaccurate the term “ideograph” may be) using Japanese-looking glyphs, even for explicitly Chinese names of places in China. The German style does the same thing and additionally displays each ideograph’s most likely Modern Standard Mandarin pronunciation, confusingly even for Japanese names of places in Japan. But this only happens as a fallback wherever OSM hasn’t got a proper romanized form (don’t know if and how it also depends on the stated language of that form), effectively meaning you will only notice if you zoom in.
We might add the pitfalls of labeling places in Poland (and similarly, in Czechia), where there is often (1) a traditional Polish name if Polish was (also) spoken in or near the place, and/or (2) a traditional German name if German was (also) spoken in or near the place, and/or (3) a non-traditional German name invented by a Nazi bureaucrat after annexation if they dismissed the traditional German name as sounding too Slavic or there was none, and/or (4) a non-traditional Polish name adopted after annexation if the traditional Polish name sounded too German or there was none. Even where (2) existed, it may have seen less currency than (1), even on old German maps. I can’t check now so I don’t remember if OSM German style prefers (2) or (3) for German labels, nor how it tells them apart.
I still don’t see any potential problems with using ISO 9 for Cyrillic (for example: я→â), which is what German style uses as fallback. I think it’s great to have as a fallback for any Cyrillic.
As I wrote in my first reply, it helps if you know whether what you’re looking at is just a language-agnostic transliteration which may not convey a good idea of pronunciation; but then, neither does the “proper” transcription for Russian, as it doesn’t indicate stress and neutralization of unstressed vowels.
*) “Pseudo” because firstly, in the case of Japan, the transliterations are obviously not real-world Chinese names; secondly, the converter cannot identify word boundaries, so converts everything into space-separated single Chinese syllables unlike proper Hanyu Pinyin; thirdly, because it cannot tell where to use uppercase, so it uses lowercase throughout, unlike proper Hanyu Pinyin; and fourthly, there may be some wrong guesses when a character has multiple readings in MSM.
“Almost every” might’ve been hyperbole on my part, but suboptimal transliterations are quite common in non-Russian Cyrillic contexts. There are some examples in https://github.com/onthegomap/planetiler/issues/86#issuecomment-1050039099 and subsequent comments from Planetiler, which uses the same l10n library. (I got a chuckle out of the transliteration of 向 as “xiàng~ke”, which is perfectly reasonable for collation but not so much for display.)
Since the German l10n tools are mentioned here twice, it’s worth noting the inherent limitations to the underlying transliteration software: because OSM does not explicitly indicate the language of the value in the name=* key, the transliterator cannot choose a transliteration scheme appropriate to that original language. Instead, it falls back to a language-agnostic transliteration scheme that’s only designed for collation, not display. Essentially, the transliterator detects the writing system and assumes a particular language, such as Russian for all Cyrillic text, Standard Arabic for all Arabic text, and Mandarin Chinese for all Chinese and Japanese text.
The upshot is that, if you use this tool for displaying labels on a world map, you can expect almost every label in Ukraine, Iran, Pakistan, or Japan to be wrong or even politically offensive. A developer might decide that showing something misleading is better than showing something completely unreadable, but they should be aware of the implications.
Sorry, I was writing from (false) memory when I first replied; but at the time I’m writing this, that reply has not made it through moderation anyway. (In the preview after submitting, my paragraph breaks looked broken; I don’t know if that caused a rejection.) I have since had the opportunity to quickly check and compare OSM’s German style with OSM’s default style on a more robust system.
Minh Nguyễn is right: If you use the German style and zoom in on China, Taiwan, or Japan, you see (pseudo*) Hanyu Pinyin everywhere. Which is a nice feature for Chinese places, whereas for Japanese places it’s mostly useless and possibly misleading clutter.
So, OSM default style displays all “CJK Unified Ideographs” (to use Unicode terminology, however inaccurate the term “ideograph” may be) using Japanese-looking glyphs, even for explicitly Chinese names of places in China.
The German style does the same thing and additionally displays each ideograph’s most likely Modern Standard Mandarin pronunciation, confusingly even for Japanese names of places in Japan. But this only happens as a fallback wherever OSM hasn’t got a proper romanized form (don’t know if and how it also depends on the stated language of that form), effectively meaning you will only notice if you zoom in.
We might add the pitfalls of labeling places in Poland (and similarly, in Czechia), where there is often (1) a traditional Polish name if Polish was (also) spoken in or near the place, and/or (2) a traditional German name if German was (also) spoken in or near the place, and/or (3) a non-traditional German name invented by a Nazi bureaucrat after annexation if they dismissed the traditional German name as sounding too Slavic or there was none, and/or (4) a non-traditional Polish name adopted after annexation if the traditional Polish name sounded too German or there was none. Even where (2) existed, it may have seen less currency than (1), even on old German maps. I can’t check now so I don’t remember if OSM German style prefers (2) or (3) for German labels, nor how it tells them apart.
I still don’t see any potential problems with using ISO 9 for Cyrillic (for example: я→â), which is what German style uses as fallback. I think it’s great to have as a fallback for any Cyrillic.
As I wrote in my first reply, it helps if you know whether what you’re looking at is just a language-agnostic transliteration which may not convey a good idea of pronunciation; but then, neither does the “proper” transcription for Russian, as it doesn’t indicate stress and neutralization of unstressed vowels.
*) “Pseudo” because firstly, in the case of Japan, the transliterations are obviously not real-world Chinese names; secondly, the converter cannot identify word boundaries, so converts everything into space-separated single Chinese syllables unlike proper Hanyu Pinyin; thirdly, because it cannot tell where to use uppercase, so it uses lowercase throughout, unlike proper Hanyu Pinyin; and fourthly, there may be some wrong guesses when a character has multiple readings in MSM.
“Almost every” might’ve been hyperbole on my part, but suboptimal transliterations are quite common in non-Russian Cyrillic contexts. There are some examples in https://github.com/onthegomap/planetiler/issues/86#issuecomment-1050039099 and subsequent comments from Planetiler, which uses the same l10n library. (I got a chuckle out of the transliteration of 向 as “xiàng~ke”, which is perfectly reasonable for collation but not so much for display.)