17/07/2025-23/07/2025
[1] | Vector Tiles are deployed on OpenStreetMap.org | Map data © OpenStreetMap Contributors.
About us
- Raquel Dezidério Souto, our editor for Brazilian Portuguese, Artur Fernandes, Gabrielle Lima, Myllene Lopes, Paloma Caetano and Tatiana Vianna have compiled
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statistics on how often weeklyOSM has mentioned each of the 102 OSM-related software products selected for analysis. The statistics are based on 10 years of publication, corresponding to issues #272 to #768 (2015–2025). There are links to the project and other useful information for those who want to explore new possibilities or improve their mapping practices.
Mapping
- The proposed tagging scheme for windmills and watermills was rejected with 10 votes in favour, 9 against, and two abstentions.
Community
- Charlie Plett has finished mapping the administrative divisions of the Spanish Empire in OpenHistoricalMap and shared a time-lapse animation.
- In the latest episode of the Geomob podcast, Ed interviewed Gregory Marle, an organiser of the State of the Map Europe conference, which will be held this year on 14 and 15 November.
- The Unique Mappers Network, the OpenStreetMap Community in Nigeria, has celebrated its 8th anniversary with a grand event on Saturday 12 July. You can watch a registry of this special moment.
- oldnab shared his first impressions of OpenStreetMap and his journey of mapping urban recycling drop-off points.
OpenStreetMap Foundation
- [1] The OpenStreetMap Foundation announced the deployment of vector tiles on OpenStreetMap.org, resulting in a sharper and faster visual layer. Furthermore, this upgrade allows developers to create their own custom styles.
- The OpenStreetMap Awards 2025 will present seven categories of community-driven awards at the State of the Map 2025 conference, with nominations being sought for projects announced between 1 January 2024 and 1 April 2025. The winners will be announced during SotM 2025, in Manila, Philippines.
Events
- The OSMF’s State of the Map Working Group has announced that the call for venues for State of the Map 2026 is now open and will run to Sunday 31 August. The selected venue for 2026 will be announced during State of the Map 2025, which will take place in Manila in October.
- SotM Nigeria 2025 will be held from 28 to 30 October. You can submit your abstract and register on the event’s website.
OSM research
- Zihan Guo and others have presented a large-scale dataset from ~12,000 EV chargers across six cities worldwide (Amsterdam, Johannesburg, Los Angeles, Melbourne, São Paulo, Shenzhen), enriched with OpenStreetMap-based geospatial features such as land use, road network proximity, and nearby amenities. By integrating OSM with hourly charging records, weather data, and pricing, the dataset enables advanced modelling of EV demand, spatio-temporal dynamics, and cross-city transfer learning.
- Dementeva, Meeusen, and Meleuman have written an article that provides a primer on the use of OpenStreetMap as a potential source of contextual geographic information for augmentation with survey data, focusing on methodological opportunities and limitations as well as mapping general OSM data wrangling methodology.
- A new study, carried out by Chifuniro Baluwa and others, has mapped 764 residential areas in Blantyre District (Malawi) using a participatory, low-cost approach that integrated local knowledge with OpenStreetMap validation. The team leveraged YouthMappers and the Malawi OSM community to fill in critical data gaps during a major cholera outbreak, producing fine-scale location data now publicly available for health response and planning.
Maps
- The shelter hut map
built using uMap, which we reported on earlier, has been expanded
by Wafer. It can now be combined with your own GPX tracks. Additionally, known hiking trails, regions, and rivers have been added, allowing for a wide range of route combinations. If you’d like to contribute, you can register in the forum and submit
your observations.
OSM in action
- Ute Roos, of Heise, reported that the European Commission has developed the EU Tourism Dashboard, a platform offering interactive visualisations of key data and indicators relevant to the European tourism ecosystem. Among its features is the ‘Indicator Map view’, an OpenStreetMap-based interactive tool that displays a range of regional statistics directly on the map interface.
Software
- A logo for CoMaps has been chosen out of a pool of 21 submissions. CoMaps is a fork of OrganicMaps.
- Markers4Map allows you to create a map marker in just one step, generate a web map link and export the results in JSON. You can also include a link in the marker label and generate a map with OpenLayers.
- Bastian Greshake Tzovaras has created the Mastodon PanoramaxContribs bot account. It automatically produces a daily summary of contributions made to the various Panoramax instances. Check out the first one.
Programming
- Anqi Xu shared some midterm progress updates on their Google Summer of Code project, focusing on transliterating non-Latin script search results in Nominatim.
- goodahn has used
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pre-rendered OSM tiles and Leaflet to control a low-end robot without an internet connection. The script they used to batch render the tiles is available on GitHub.
Other “geo” things
- On Monday 23 June, during Digital Day 2025, Isabel Fischer, Sonja Lindhauer, and Alexander Winkler led
an online digital walking tour. They explained how Berlin’s cultural heritage is being digitised and made accessible to society.
Upcoming Events
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 IVIDES.org, Lejun, MatthiasMatthias, Raquel Dezidério Souto, Strubbl, Andrew Davidson, adiatmad, barefootstache, derFred.
We welcome link suggestions for the next issue via this form and look forward to your contributions.