Long time OSM user and occasional contributor, I recently found out that I can import bus stops from the operator* data for the area of Grenoble, France. For the moment I just want to import stop points which don’t exists in OSM.

I described all the process in this wiki page and, as it seems that mass imports are not always a good idea, I’d be happy to read any comment or tips ! I am currently discussing with locals contributors and doing some tests import on the dev server

* the data producer is not really the operator of the bus

Líneas corregidas / revisadas / mapeadas

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Florencio Varela

• 500 (No actualizada)
• 503 K, R IDA (No actualizada)
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• 513 S (No actualizada)

Ituzaingó

• 504

La Matanza

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Lanús

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Merlo

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Morón

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San Martín

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Fuera del AMBA

Cañuelas

• 502 Parque Industrial Km. 48, Uribelarrea, Máximo Paz, UCES, Hospital (Posiblemente completa)

Pergamino

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• E

Pilar

• 501/503 Manzone, Alejo x Nicaragua, Militar, Luchetti (Posiblemente completa)
• 506
• 509
• 510 ramales 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 9 (Posiblemente completa)
• 511 Carabassa, Manzanares, Luchetti, Golfer’s, Universidad, Esc. 88 IDA, Pilarica (Posiblemente completa)
• 520 (Posiblemente completa)

In the English Channel, technically outside of the UK, there are the Crown Dependencies of Jersey and Guernsey. Aside from the main island of Guernsey there are three related islands: Alderney, Herm, and Sark. I visited the latter two by ferry earlier this month.
You can find plenty of travel photos of these places, so I will try to focus on the niche topics of mapping and car-free communities.

Herm is the smaller island with ~60 permanent residents. They have even banned bicycles? I had two hours and mapped a newer business and a sculpture near the quay. There is a one-person hut with a sign saying it’s their jail/gaol - I wasn’t sure if it was a joke?
One of the boat landing sites was a bit precarious:

… See full entry

Ya está disponible a través del gestor de tareas el proyecto para la incorporación de edificios y direcciones en el municipio de Almogía. Dado que se trata de un municipio con un número manejable de edificaciones, se prevé que la integración de estos datos en OpenStreetMap pueda completarse en un plazo relativamente corto y sin grandes dificultades.

Captura de pantalla del proyecto para la incorporación de edificios y direcciones en el municipio de Almogía. Fuente: Gestor de tareas de OpenStreetMap.

I’ve been a geography nerd for my entire life. Recently, I’ve gotten into OSM as part of my need to map bike lanes for an advocacy article on bike lanes.

Initially, I mapped manually using Mapbox studio. Yes, it was tedious.

A bit more research led to OSM. I checked ways to pull down bike lane tags. That led me to the world of OverpassQL, with Overpass Turbo and the Overpass API. Along the way, I also got a taste of tagging with the need to find bike related infrastructure. Apparently, all the tags here apply:

• bike=
• cycleway=
• cycleway_left=
• cycleway_right=
• cycleway_both=

Quite fun.

I managed to put my query together. Google Gemini search AI tried to be helpful with query suggestions. It was of limited accuracy.

After realizing that some infrastructure was missing, I had to consider maintenance of my underlying data. With OSM being an open source project, I decided to become a contributor.

The iD webapp was too limited for me. I’ve worked extensively with ArcMap before. JOSM was my tool of choice.

That leads me to today. I found additional bike maps (cycleOSM) that were nice but not illustrative enough. I also made my first updates to OSM. JOSM certainly has a learning curve but it’s mild.

I’ll still be making my own queries and I still plan to use Mapbox for my visualization. Will also have to test out Esri’s visual storytelling features.

More to come.

There are a number of ongoing discussions about the geocoder on osm.org (Nominatim) in the forum at the moment. These include spelling tolerance, how it might work with data that does not exist in OSM yet and what it actually returns.

Sometimes the results of the last of those can be a bit odd. Here for example is a post office not far from me. The returned data (“Stillington Post Office & Stores, Main Street, Stillington, York, North Yorkshire, York and North Yorkshire, England, YO61 1JS, United Kingdom”) has three things that could plausibly be a county in there - York itself, North Yorkshire, and York and North Yorkshire. In OSM these are respectively a nearby place=city node, and encompassing admin_level=6 and admin_level=5 relations.

… See full entry

– ENGLISH BELOW

Lição bilíngue criada para a oficina sobre mapeamento de caminhos (ways) no OpenStreetMap - PT | EN

 

A oficina que foi realizada no dia 18 de setembro de 2025, 100% ao vivo e online, é um oferecimento da empresa IVIDES DATA.

 

Link para a lição bilíngue - PT | EN (3,9 MB) - PDF

 

O certificado de realização será enviado a quem completar satisfatoriamente uma prática de mapeamento, conforme consta nos últimos slides do PDF disponibilizado. NOVO PRAZO: 01-10-2025.

 

… See full entry

If there’s one thing people who know me will say, it’s that I’m a proud Lokeraar through and through. The history of Lokeren, and the way the city keeps changing, has always fascinated me.

It all started in 2019 when I began editing Lokeren’s Wikipedia page. I wanted it to be more than just a dry article—I wanted it to reflect the city’s character with accurate and engaging information. After two years of expanding and polishing, I felt I had done my part there, and I started looking for other ways to put Lokeren on the map.

That’s when I discovered OpenStreetMap in 2021. My first edit was just a tiny stream in Lokeren. But from that small start, it turned into a real passion. Before long, I was mapping everything: trees, bike paths, parking lots, even new buildings as they appeared.

Now, four years later, I can proudly say the mission has been a success so far. But it doesn’t stop here—Lokeren keeps growing, and so does my map. And honestly, that’s the best part: there’s always something new to add, and always another story to tell about my hometown.

This is the story of how I mapped the islands off the west coast of the Korean Peninsula. The story began on July 24th (two months ago). I thought long and hard about what mark I should leave on cartography, what was within my capabilities? And the task that seemed feasible to me was to map the islands of South Korea. TTheir number is limited, and the territory between them is much smaller than on the mainland. So, I realized it was a realistic task. All that remained was to find a way to start. I needed not the smallest, but not the largest island either, something that would be a great start. And so I selected the islands of the 영흥면: 영흥도, 선재도, 측도, 부도 and about a dozen more less significant ones.

I did all the work using an ID editor. My skills at the beginning were extremely mediocre, but I learned a lot along the way.

선재도 Island

… See full entry

Background

In 2023, New Brunswick (Canada) underwent a province-wide restructuring of their municipal boundaries. This consisted of 77 Incorporated Municipalities and 12 Unincorporated Rural Districts. Between 2023 and 2025, only a small handful of these boundaries were actually imported into OSM. Thus, I took it upon myself to begin what was my largest project ever, a full import of the updated boundaries across the province.

I saw it fit to write up a post summarizing the work that was done, along with some of the rationales for certain tagging methods used in this project, in order to maintain consistency both now and into the future. It should be noted that this was not an automated import, every kilometer of boundary was manually reviewed. The data used was from GeoNB, under the Open Government License – New Brunswick.

Pre-Import Phase/Admin Level Restructuring

When I started this project, New Brunswick’s existing boundary data was a complete mess, some larger cities had admin_level=6 boundaries, while other incorporated municipalities were tagged admin_level=8, and parishes were sharing admin_level=6, leading to overlaps. For instance, Saint-François Parish and Haut-Madawaska were both tagged admin_level=6, despite them occupying the same geographical area.

To fix this problem, I decided to shift all Parish boundaries to admin_level=8, and assign admin_level=6 to all municipal boundaries. The new admin level hierarchy is logical because Parishes are not incorporated government entities and have no modern-day purpose. Furthermore, it more closely resembles data in other provinces in Canada (such as Alberta, Quebec, and Nova Scotia), which prioritize admin_level=6 for municipal districts. Both the New Brunswick wiki as well as the Canada admin level wiki pages were updated to reflect these changes.

Below are some examples of the admin_level tagging schema before and after my updates:

Example 1 [Before]:

… See full entry

97394 addresses completed.

Salut,sunt Darius si sunt un nou editor aici daca fac ceva gresit va rog sa imi scrieti pe chat. Multumesc!

As I’m interested in pedestrian infrastructure, I asked myself what percentage of all sidewalks in Germany has already been mapped.

It is difficult to answer this question because I do not know the total number of sidewalks in Germany. However, it is possible to change the question slightly to make it easier to answer: How many streets in Germany contain information about the presence of sidewalks?

This is easier to answer, because we can assume that all streets of Germany have already been mapped. Therefore, to answer the question, we just have to count the streets that contain the desired information.

 

Sidewalk tags

Currently, four tags are in use for mapping sidewalks: sidewalk, sidewalk:left, sidewalk:right and sidewalk:both. The tag sidewalk was introduced around 2010 and is still widespread, accounting for around 80% of all sidewalk tags:

… See full entry

Artificial Intelligence OpenAI Maps4 and finance. Things are progressing beautifully.

I am telling it what to do in English, and it’s writing the tags for me and making the edit. I will review everything it does and not do anything with it that I wouldn’t do by hand (but more tediously).

On September 20th, 2025, the Oyomappers Team had an amazing time participating in a map and clean-up event sponsored by the Humanitarian Open Street Map Team (Hot). We used Chatmap to help us with the exercise, and it was truly impactful!

During the cleanup at Ajegunle Market in Oyo, Oyo State, Nigeria, the atmosphere was filled with joy. The community was so grateful, and we felt their warmth as they expressed their appreciation and prayed for us. It was a wonderful experience to be part of something so positive!

Preto da xeral, cara a Santiago:

1: 42.83260561456377, -8.490026482670231

2: 42.833944, -8.4885

3: 42.83227214824429, -8.484829702587875

4 — meténdose no monte: 42.83589523767619, -8.478794732324063

5 — xunto ó polígono: 42.832087250867744, -8.47701374553567

Cara ó Claudio:

6: 42.82891202269784, -8.44964144451512

Cara Quian:

7 — zona de casas e cans: 42.82549704792105, -8.466056563567795

8 — desvío pequecho na costa grande: 42.824348189151635, -8.460949637702718

9 — está nun lugar un pouco incómodo, ó lado do centro de Quian: 42.82171989767033, -8.4618508598875

10 — finca ó lado do centro: 42.82248321535699, -8.464114526157271

11 — paso dos eucaliptos: 42.82184580637066, -8.464704612129077

12 — pódese entrar? 42.820665401972235, -8.46381411875115

13 — á beira do río pasado o túnel. As castañas son pequenas: 42.82365571596714, -8.468277314517298

14 — cara ó monte. As castañas son xigantescas: 42.82161496766397, -8.471076563043434

15 — unha recta solitaria: 42.824161, -8.471682

This afternoon, while pondering and daydreaming about seriously quitting OSM for real, I ventured into the land of Wikimapia.

Then I stumbled upon a conversation between high-ranking admins over there.

“Why did you delete a number of TNB sub-stations from the map? Don’t you think those tags were useful, to some people at least? I think the user(s) who initially created those tags put a lot of effort in detailing the model nos., etc. for some of the sub-stations. Thanks.”

“The TNB sub stations is not a place. It just an OBJECT just like small bridges, security guard post, small jetty etc. Different with a PLACE such as Pulau Pinang Bridge or any big bridges, police station or a port such as Port Kelang. As you can see there are few users that like to tag a small roadside stall and a small public toilet. That also is in the list for deletion. You must know to differentiate what can be tag and what can’t.”

“I was under the impression that anything permanent of some importance (except personal houses) could be tagged. If that’s the case, people shouldn’t be tagging ATM machines, telco towers, transmission towers, etc. To be honest, I disagree with you on this point as TNB substations are permanent and important to some people as I mentioned before.”

“You may disagree with me but TNB sub stations is not an important objects for WM users. It just like tagging a bus stops and taxi stands if you know what I mean”

Well, maybe I should stay in OpenStreetMap.

---

Jokes aside, I’m quite surprised that Wikimapia is still active today. I still see several Wikimapia mappers still doing dedicated micromapping in their respective neighborhoods.

… See full entry

One of the trickiest challenges in OSM is when a river (or any linear water feature) doubles as a regional or administrative boundary.

Rivers shift course over time; floods, erosion, and meanders, while boundaries often remain legally fixed. The result? Misalignments, overlapping lines, or confusing gaps on our maps.

For many contributors, editing such overlaps is daunting. Boundaries are sensitive, technically complex, and mistakes can cause big issues. Yet, leaving them mismatched affects disaster planning, legal clarity, and overall map quality.

My Question to Experienced Mappers 🙏

How do you decide whether to follow the legal boundary or the current river course?

Rivers don’t wait. Boundaries don’t move. But as mappers, we can bridge the gap. I’d love to hear your experiences and solutions!

Qwajo OSM

While working on an OSM-related statistics project that I need to present in the next few months, I stumbled across some ‘conversations of the past,’ scattered in changeset comments and block reports.

Some of those conversations triggered a strong emotional response in me—so much that I had to pause for a quick breather. I think I’ve just been exposed to a serious infohazard.

Then I remembered “that page” on Wikimedia Meta-Wiki.

Wikistress is stress caused by activity on a wiki like Wikipedia such as conflict, vandals, trolls, edit wars, and incivility.

I’ve suffered this kind of stress several times on Wikipedia, and now—since OSM is by nature quite similar to Wikipedia—I’ve relapsed again.

By the way, on that page, there are several tips for dealing with personal wikistress. I think we can adapt those tips to the OpenStreetMap context.

“Edit a less controversial page.”

Instead of big, difficult tasks such as place and highway classifications, adding things like toilets, cafés, restaurants, and pet shops might be less controversial (and more wholesome to do).

“Stop looking at your watchlist. It does contain pages that you are emotionally involved with. Of course, not having any pages in your watchlist is a good start :)”

Stay away from the OpenStreetMap Carto basemap (or any OSM-derived map tiles) for awhile?

“Take a long vacation. Treat yourself to relaxation, favorite TV shows (unless they cause you wikistress), spend time with friends, family, and pets, and maybe try something new.”

“If you are just reverting and deleting and not enjoying yourself then STOP. Someone else will have to deal with it. Do something else. “

“Remind yourself why it’s best to avoid fights and ignore trolls “

“Unsubscribe from the mailing lists and escape the pointless repetitive arguments, the endless recriminations and the general desire to create more heat than light.”

… See full entry