I was looking for a house and decided to use OSM to help me find the optimal location. I had several fixed conditions: I knew my office location and I was looking for a condo close to a primary school. I used OSM to extract all schools and residential buildings. As there were many residential buildings, I used DBSCAN to find clusters and pick one representative building per cluster. To reduce the number of routes to compute, I used the OSRM table service to filter schools and houses within 5 km of each other. Then I ran the OSRM route service on triplets of (home, school, office). I saved the route polylines and locations into a CSV file, then created a KML file based on it and imported it into Google My Maps for visualizing the results. The resulting map is useful for getting a first impression of possible places to live. I am getting quite a few schools and houses to choose from, but I still find it valuable to have a view of the entire city that does not depend on what I happened to find first.

I’d like to announce the release of a new Docker container instance for Overpass.

I’ve been running Overpass locally for a couple of years and have dealt with some reliability issues by improving the shell scripts that drive database updates.

I’ve been sharing those shell scripts with people but I wanted a better way to distribute them. So, I put some effort into cleaning up the scripts (with some significant improvements – see below!) and packaged them in a container build.

Another Overpass Container?

Yes!

There’s already the excellent wiktorn/overpass-api which does a great job of setting up a local Overpass instance. If that looks good to you, you should definitely use it!

For my own use, I wanted something with all the improvements to stability and reliability that I had rolled into the shell scripts, but that would stay true to the original Overpass source code and that would expose all the same configuration options as if it were running on bare metal. I also wanted all the operational support that I already had locally, like configurable area generation intervals and periodic database backups.

Then, given the issues with the performance of public Overpass servers, and the efforts to limit large-scale usage, it seems that having more Overpass servers can only help the community.

What’s Different About This Container?

Better Database Updates

First, the database update process is much more robust. When things go wrong during Overpass database updates, the database files can be corrupted. And when that happens you have to start over with a fresh database, either from a backup or from a fresh download. That can mean many hours of downtime.

The shell scripts for database updates have been improved to shut down as gracefully under controlled circumstances and to handle uncontrolled shutdowns as safely as possible.

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ES below

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The Virtual Institute for Sustainable Development - IVIDES.org® and the company IVIDES DATA® is opening two vacancies to update and translate the content of its OpenStreetMap Course

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The Virtual Institute for Sustainable Development – IVIDES.org® and the company IVIDES DATA® are offering a partnership opportunity to update and translate the content of their complete course into English (can be US-EN OR UK-EN) and Spanish (ES).

Conditions:

1. Both individuals and organisations are eligible to apply. However, organisations must be duly registered in their country in order to receive the funds;

2. Expected duration of the work: two months (June and July 2026);

3. Applicants must be citizens from an English- or Spanish-speaking country.

In return, the company offers:

1. Permanent promotion of the partner’s brand (and/or the name of the person responsible for the translation) on the course page and in all related materials, such as advertisements and others.

2. The full translation into each language will be rewarded with US$ 200. Complete PDF file: Raquel Dezidério Souto. (2025). Curso de capacitação em mapeamento com OpenStreetMap - Curso completo. Rio de Janeiro: IVIDES DATA, 2025. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17428748

If you’re interested in taking part, please send an email to:

ivides [at] ivides.org

with the details below. The deadline for registration is 8th May 2026. Let’s go!

1. Your CV (and/or a letter of intent);

2. Proof of identity (or national organisation registration document) AND

3. Your OSM username (full URL).

IVIDES DATA® is a small IT consultancy firm based in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil). We are fully registered in Brazil (CNPJ 56.127.866/0001-12) and can negotiate/operate worldwide.

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Here’s what’s changed in the UrbanEye3D plugin over the past week.

We’ve got translations for several more languages: Indonesian, French, and Cornish.

Translations into Spanish and Portuguese as well as into Volapük and Esperanto would be greatly appreciated. Just in case you would like to do that, the pot file can be found here.

I was interested in finding walkable areas in a city I had never visited before. After using OpenClaw bot to summarize my JSON files, I thought I could do the same for OSM-based metrics.

I started by generating an OSM extract with a 5km radius from my hotel. I then extracted the geometry and tags for every way, park, building, and tourist attraction in this area. I normalized the raw data into a handful of generic classes like “Food & Café” and “Nature / Quiet.”

I then assigned each way and point of interest to an H3 hexagon. I calculated aggregate metrics for each hexagon, like the length of roads and the area taken up by parks and water. Then I simply fed the metrics for the hexagon to Ollama with Mistral Nemo, asking it to generate a short one-sentence vibe of a place based on the collected metrics and label it as positive, negative, or mixed.

To visualize the results, I created a KML file and imported it into Google My Maps. I had to iterate on the LLM prompts, as there are a lot of fields in the generated JSON and the LLM struggles to interpret what the numbers mean.

I also discovered a number of bugs in how I calculate features per H3 hexagon, but I eventually arrived at a reasonable overlay showing how walkable each area is. It’s not perfect — partly because OSM data is incomplete for the area I picked, and partly because I need to make my prompts more specific.

The recommendations are generic, but they add an extra dimension to the map. I think this is really exciting because you can create any perspective you like on OSM data with your own overlays for driving, finding a house, or finding a place to eat.

At the suggestion of a friend, I decided to install StreetComlete and give OpenStreetMaps a try. I’ll be adding data as walk and bike and hike around the area.

From February 21th to April 23th I spend 192 extra hours on iD and iD tagging schema, thanks to funding from OpenStreetMap Foundation. This grant is now complete and I want to report on progress made thanks to it.

And I want to also thank for other help:

• Kyℓe Hensel (k-yle) and Martin Raifer (tyrasd) for multiple meetings to process found PRs/issues (as some actions required consultations or can be taken only by maintainers)
• authors of pull requests, for preparing code - I also want to thank all people who made good faith contributions but where PR were either sadly closed without merge for some reason (or are not yet processed at all - sadly many are still waiting)
• authors of various useful issues
• people who provided feedback by reviewing - github, on forums
• special thanks for language advise to Brian Sperlongano (ZeLonewolf) and Minh Nguyễn (1ec5) and others
• everyone else who helped

Here is list of pull requests and issues that were processed during that time, with very limited commentary. I will post also report on forums with more commentary and without detailed listing of issues and PRs.

I want to mention also that substantial design and review work was spend on schema builder to unblock its release. Work on including relation structure knowledge into tagging schema[1][2] took hours, but is not listed below as this PRs are not yet merged. Though it is getting closer now that blocker was resolved.

Disclaimer: I took these notes while working and looked over for mistakes before publishing (fixing some), but I have not tripple checked everything. If you see a mistake, please let me know.

I tested and reviewed this changes prepared by others, recommended changes to be merged and it was followed by maintainers:

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I’m currently in England and have been focusing much of my mapping on improving coverage and detail across the UK. This includes refining road classifications, updating POIs, checking alignments, and making sure tagging stays consistent with current conventions. I try to ground edits in available imagery, local knowledge where possible, and existing community practices.

Alongside that, I’ve been contributing to mapping efforts in parts of Africa. In many of these areas, even small additions like connecting road networks, adding missing settlements, or improving basic infrastructure data can make a meaningful difference for map usability. I’ve been working through tasks such as validating road geometry, adding surface and access tags where appropriate, and helping expand coverage in places that are still relatively under-mapped.

I’m also interested in maintaining data quality over time, not just adding new features. That means reviewing older edits, resolving inconsistencies, and occasionally revisiting areas as better imagery or information becomes available. Consistency in tagging and structure is something I try to pay attention to, especially when working across different regions with varying mapping styles.

Going forward, I’ll continue contributing where I can, both locally in the UK and in regions that benefit from additional mapping support. (i only got into mapping cuz i was bored as i cant play video games… for some reason)

(Made by chatgpt which is why it sound awkward, i just told it my info and it made this) thank u to all who actually read these…

I am quite new and becuz i am unable to play any games i spend some free time doing this mapping ‘game’ as I first thought years ago and then I made account and learned about how to do OSM properly and efficiently and I think it’s good to learn some tech thing.

I map places in UK and also Africa where it is more important to navigate around, and there is large areas of undermapping. (anyway this is useless but whatever its just introduction..

hi

If you’ve been surveying the OpenStreetMap (OSM) map notes in Indonesia, you’ve likely encountered a wave of “spam” or irrelevant notes. These aren’t usually malicious; rather, they are often misplaced private memos from third-party mobile applications that use OSM tiles.

Users often mistake the “Add a Note” feature for a personal notepad or a private “Save Location” tool. Some of these notes are even remnants of data synced from apps nearly a decade ago.

Why is this happening? Many apps integrate OSM. Users see a “Notes” button and assume it’s a private diary for their travels.

This list of spam keywords is not exhaustive. I will continue to update this diary entry as new patterns emerge from the Indonesian mapping community.

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Jika Anda melihat catatan peta OpenStreetMap (OSM) di Indonesia, kemungkinan besar Anda akan menemukan “spam” atau catatan yang tidak relevan. Memo tersebut sering kali merupakan memo pribadi yang salah tempat dari aplikasi seluler pihak ketiga yang menggunakan tile OSM.

Pengguna sering salah mengira fitur “Tambahkan Catatan” sebagai catatan pribadi atau fitur “Simpan Lokasi” pribadi. Beberapa catatan ini bahkan merupakan sisa data yang disinkronkan dari aplikasi hampir satu dekade lalu.

Mengapa ini terjadi? Banyak aplikasi mengintegrasikan OSM. Pengguna melihat tombol “Catatan” dan menganggapnya sebagai buku harian pribadi untuk perjalanan mereka.

Daftar kata kunci spam ini tidak lengkap. Saya akan terus memperbarui catatan harian ini seiring munculnya pola-pola baru dari komunitas pemetaan Indonesia.

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I have been completely inactive for over a year but I’m trying to pick myself up and keep mapping. I’m very rusty due to the fact that I’ve been inactive but i believe I’ll improve in due time!

My Introduction to OSM at Unique Mappers Network Author: Victory114 | Date: 21st April 2026 | Location: Unique Mappers Network, UNIPORT Mall, Port-Hacourt, Nigeria Language: English

Setting The Scene.

I was introduced to Unique Mappers Network (UMT) by my mentor; an Environmental Consultant, CEO, lecturer, and Engineer, Engr. Andrew John. He informed me about a call for applications that had been advertised on LinkedIn on the 26 February 2026. With only three days to apply, I seized the opportunity with much excitement. It was a chance to utilise and build on my knowledge and skills in GIS. I submitted my application and was delighted when UMT accepted me. I was then invited to visit the headquarters in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, for an interview and induction.

Arriving At UMT.

I arrived at UMT headquarters for the first time filled with excitement and curiosity. The National Coordinator, Dr Victor, interviewed me and gave me a thorough induction on what to expect during my time with the organisation. I was later added to the organisation’s group chat and had the opportunity to ask questions and learn about UMT’s excellent achievements, including their international engagements in Paris and Romania, OSM conference and State of the Map. I was impressed by Dr Victor’s depth of knowledge and experience in GIS, training, and event coordination. From that first conversation, I felt assured of the quality of guidance that would be available to me throughout my internship.

How I Found Unique Mappers Network.

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All that’s left is things like power poles, fire hydrants. But every building has a shape now. Every thing that has an address is now on the map.

I know in a month or so I will have to go back and adjust 2nd at Windfeldt as a new sidewalk is being put in. It’s about 2/3 complete.

I started the mapping process on November 18. So five months to map my home.

Yesterday marks the start of my Open Street Map contributions. Pikmin enthusiast. But more importantly, a food, culture and cuisine person.

Hello, I’m Aidan Kaita Saka from Tanzania 🇹🇿. An active youth mapper dedicated to improving maps for my community. I enjoy contributing roads, buildings, places, and useful local information to help people navigate better. Proud to support OpenStreetMap and community development.

Regarding Lougheed Highway in Coquitlam, BC, Canada: Nothing along Lougheed between Sage Place and Schoolhouse is accessible to foot traffic, but much of it claims to be, despite the significant danger. Lougheed appears to be editable in many sections, and I don’t know how to change the entire strip easily. Can someone help? Thank you!

Translations into the following languages have been added:

• English
• German
• Italian
• Slovak
• Russian

There are a lot of German speaking people in OSM, so this should help :)

Not much strings though :) There are also several validation messages, but there are just 32 lines total.

Just in case you would like to translate the plugin in any other language, here is the pot file.

We do not have any web UI for translations, but you can use PoEdit instead.

Because sometimes you want to see less rather than more, I created this. It’s the railway information from the existing transportation layer of the SVE01 schema, together with railway stations, places and water as needed for context.

One thing that it does is to distinguish between regular transportation railway stations and tourist ones.

Freight lines are de-emphasised (see here and disused and abandoned railways are shown in a barely-discernable grey.

The source of the style is here but that is just a subset of the “show everything” style for this schema here.

RETEX: My Journey into RTK

(text translated from my original entry in french using Chatgpt)

to be continued, perhaps:

• journal entry (coming soon): Existential questions about my encounter with Panoramax
• journal entry (coming soon): Mapping my village

I would like to point out that these journal entries are neither WIKI pages nor expert advice… They are simply accounts of lived experiences shared here for anyone who may be interested.

Why did I become interested in this topic?

During my urban recycling trekking (see previous journal entries), I photographed all the voluntary drop-off containers I came across, uploaded these photos to Panoramax, and added the Panoramax photo reference in OSM. This caused me no issues, as my goal was that, from the standard OpenStreetMap rendering layer, it would be easy (in this case, a simple click) to find the images.

I positioned the containers in OSM not based on the photo, but using aerial imagery and relevant environmental features (street intersections, buildings, etc.). This worked perfectly well until I noticed three things:

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