OSM Mingguan 823

23/04/2026-29/04/2026

Mapping

• Comments are requested on this proposal:

  • terminal=yes to consistently map goods terminals and better describe connected transport modes and handled cargo.

• The following proposal is up for a vote:

  • highway=service + service=safari to map dedicated service roads in safari parks.

Community

• In an interview on the OpenCage Blog, Christian Quest outlined plans for the Panoramax Foundation to coordinate an open federated street-level imagery platform. The initiative aims to foster international collaboration and draws inspiration from the OpenStreetMap Foundation.

• Christian Quest has reminded us that the Panoramax instance run by OSM France accepts images from outside France for testing purposes only. However, almost half of all images are from foreign countries. He warned that the board of OSM France will decide soon whether to delete those pictures, because disk space is running out. According to recent figures, the Panoramax federation has grown to 10 instances, which now hosts over 100 million openly licensed street-level images contributed by more than 2,000 users. This was celebrated by Bastian Greshake Tzovaras on Mastodon.

• 9_tab wrote about Quartiers de Genève :FR-s: in their OSM User Diary. A mapping sprint around Geneva has organised the place=* nodes and local data for neighbourhoods and quarters has been compared with those mapped.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

• The OpenStreetMap Foundation has published its 2026 budget, approved in January, projecting around GBP 822,000 in income and about GBP 933,000 in expenditure. It includes funding for staff, contractors, microgrants, and infrastructure. It may be revised during the year.

• The OSMF has documented the short presentations given during public board meetings and is considering reviving these community talks in 2026. The ten-minute slots provide insights into projects and initiatives from the OSM community.

Events

• Silvina Meritano and Bastian Greshake Tzovaras gave :ES-s: a talk about OSM at the Latinamerican Festival for Free Software Installation in Córdoba. Their slides and materials are available :ES-s: online.

• An OSM Hackweekend in Karlsruhe (Germany) has been announced :DE-s: for 26 and 27 September 2026. This event invites developers and contributors to participate in projects related to OpenStreetMap.

• The call for papers for OSM Science 2026 has been extended. The conference will take place as part of State of the Map 2026, which will be held in Paris.

• The Wikidata and OpenStreetMap Taiwan communities have called for proposals for the joint State of the Map Taiwan 2026 / Wikidata Community Summit track at COSCUP. Submissions on topics such as Open Data, linked data, and OSM are open until Saturday 9 May.

Education

• IVIDES.org and IVIDES DATA are offering an opportunity of two paid vacancies to update and translate the content of the IVIDES.org’s OpenStreetMap course into English (can be either American or British) and Spanish. Please consult :EN-s:/:ES-s: the conditions and send your letter of intent by Friday 8 May.

• IVIDES DATA is now accepting registrations :PT-s: for its 2026 OpenStreetMap Workshop series (which will be in Portuguese), which consists of five sessions covering a variety of topics, such as mapping with OSM, QGIS plugins, web forms with KoboToolbox, and web maps with uMap. The focus of this edition of the series is to provide participants with the tools they need to develop a small practical project. The organisers believe that, in this way, the knowledge gained through these free software tools can be better integrated by the participants.

OSM research

• HeiGIT presented a study on automated road crack localisation for highway maintenance, using network data extracted from OpenStreetMap to enable spatially guided analysis and improve infrastructure monitoring. The study was published in Transactions in GIS30 and was authored by Knoblauch, Muthusamy, Ghamis, and Zipf.

Maps

• Christoph Hormann has proposed changing how OpenStreetMap Carto determines the name of a feature when labelling it on the map.

• The Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek (German Digital Library) has published :DE-s: a thematic :DE-s:→:EN-t: web map of right-wing extremist violence in Germany since 1945, linked to the library’s archives from Archivportal-D. The map’s layers are based on OpenStreetMap or OpenHistoricalMap, depending on the time period.

OSM in action

• ^[1]^ Zoe Skyforest reported on Hackaday about a new national pastime in Australia: the sport of Payphone Tag. Developed by Alex Allchin, it is a capture-the-flag game in which players dial a number using local public phones to capture the area surrounding them. A real-time map of territories held by players is displayed via an OpenStreetMap-based web map. There have been 800 players in the last seven days and a total of 36,640 captures so far.

• Leonardo Texidó Quintana has developed a ride-hailing :ES-s: application for Cuba by leveraging OpenStreetMap data and forking Organic Maps for both passenger and driver apps. This app has facilitated more than 20,000 real taxi trips during a fuel crisis, operating on low-end smartphones with 2GB of RAM and intermittent 2G connectivity.

Open Data

• GOWIRES is a new open dataset combining location data from over 400,000 wind turbines worldwide (across 89 countries) with historical and future wind resource data. The geographic data is largely based on OpenStreetMap and has been validated against national registries.

• OCHA Centre for Humanitarian Data has published a global dataset of sub-national administrative boundaries for 110 countries.

Software

• In response to recent issues with the public Overpass servers, Kai Johnson has published a new Docker container image for Overpass, allowing people to run their own Overpass instances.

• HeiGIT has announced that their URL api.openrouteservice.org is being deprecated in favour of api.heigit.org. While the services remain unchanged, users need to update their applications before the shutdown in August 2026.

• geoObserver has showcased :DE-s:→:EN-t: DrawonMaps. This is a web app that detects the edges of an uploaded image, then traces and fills the image using the OpenStreetMap street network.

• GéoDataMine has made it easy to extract :FR-s:→:EN-t: thematic data from OpenStreetMap in the form of spreadsheets or geographic files. The data is updated daily and made available in CSV, GeoJSON, XSLX, and Shapefile formats. It is made compatible with national data schemas where they exist; otherwise, it follows OpenStreetMap conventions.

• Ilya Zverev has noted that a ticket regarding the support of multiple accounts in JOSM, which had been open for 15 years, has been closed with the status ‘won’t fix’. Consequently, there will continue to be no native support for multiple user accounts in JOSM. Some users are getting around this limitation with personal scripts, such as reported by M!dgard for *NIX systems. An alternative method that also works for Windows is available :DE-s:.

• The members of the osm2pgsql project announced that they recently won a grant from the NGI0 Commons Fund to work on the Compact OpenStreetMap Data Archive project (tentative name), aimed at reducing the memory and disk usage of osm2pgsql by implementing more efficient storage formats.

• The OpenGridWorks project, led :ES-s:→:EN-t: by Alejandro Polanco, shows energy infrastructure and uses CARTO and OpenStreetMap for its reference geospatial layers. The available layers include power stations, transmission lines, substations, gas pipelines, data centres, planned transmission projects, submarine cable routes, and flood risk.

Programming

• Candid Dauth has introduced a new fork of openstreetmap-tile-server, which separates database and rendering, while supporting modern osm2pgsql features. This approach aims to enable more flexible and efficient tile hosting with incremental updates.

• Evgeny Arbatov has developed ‘vibe mapping’, a pipeline that analyses the overall vibe of a place using OpenStreetMap data. From the OSM data extract it divides an area into H3 hexagons, then calculates aggregate metrics for each hexagon. Based on these metrics, it asks an AI model to generate a short, one-sentence description of the place’s vibe. The code is available on GitHub.

• NieWnen has published a script that filters OSM replication files using .poly boundaries, to keep regional databases updated with osm2pgsql. This approach offers an alternative to Overpass and enables more flexible self-hosted data processing. The code is available on GitHub.

• Mark Litwintschik presented a reverse geocoding prototype based on Overture Maps that retrieves country codes and nearest addresses without external APIs. The underlying datasets also include OpenStreetMap data and are processed locally.

Releases

• Nils Nolde has released Valhalla 3.7.0, introducing features such as multimodal routing, OSM XML support, and additional metadata. This release also included numerous bug fixes and changes to routing and data processing components.

• Route-Crafter version 0.2.4 has improved the handling of very long routes, fixed mobile UI issues, and added warnings when settings change. It also updated features for setting the start location button and improved the route player traversed line visualisation.

• Marcus Jaschen has published a new route manager for Bikerouter, allowing users to store and organise routes either in the browser or on servers.

Did you know that …

• … Bikemap.net allows users to plan cycling routes worldwide using OpenStreetMap data for routing and maps?

• … Skaringa has developed :DE-s: a map of river basins in Central Europe using OpenStreetMap waterway network data?

OSM in the media

• A recent :DE-s:→:EN-t: comparison of online cycling route planners highlighted Bikerouter (based on BRouter) as a powerful and fully free tool with extensive routing options and OSM-based maps. Bikerouter.de, created by Marcus Jaschen, relies :DE-s:→:EN-t: on OpenStreetMap data for accurate routing and offers advanced customisation and export formats such as GPX or GeoJSON.

• An article by Anna Biselli, on netzpolitik.org, presented :DE-s:→:EN-t: some privacy-friendly alternatives to commercial navigation apps, including several based on OpenStreetMap. The article highlighted decentralised approaches and offline use as key advantages.

• The Rail Agenda noticed in Substack that Oxford and Cambridge have no direct rail link today after the closure of the Varsity Line in the 1960s. The proposed East West Rail would restore one, with four trains per hour on the full corridor. The post is illustrated with an OSM map and used Wikimedia Commons data.

• Joe Fedewa took a look at StreetComplete, which rewards users with points for contributing to the improvement of OpenStreetMap. The concept is intended to create additional incentives to supplement and correct local map data.

Other “geo” things

• Crust News has noticed that Apple Maps no longer displays the names of various towns and villages across Lebanon. The removal is not limited to the area of the country facing Israeli invasion and attacks, it applies nationwide. Only a handful of larger cities remain labeled: Beirut, Tyre, Sidon, and a small number of others.

• The city of Porto will host :PT-s:→:EN-t: the 17th Iberian Conference on Spatial Data Infrastructures, which will take place from 11 to 13 November 2026. For the theme of spatial data infrastructure in a changing world, the event has issued an open call :PT-s:→:EN-t: for the submission of papers until Wednesday 10 June.

• The Bathymetric Data Viewer is an interactive map providing a search and discovery service for the bathymetry data and digital elevation models archived at NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information. A geoviewer with layers from the IHO Data Centre for Digital Bathymetry is also available.

• According to the proposed :DE-s:→:EN-t: Emergency Care Reform Act, the German Federal Ministry of Health plans to create a public registry of automated external defibrillators.

• After it had been an EU requirement for two years, Jesper Zedlitz reviewed :DE-s:→:EN-t: the status of high value datasets in Germany and revealed major differences between federal states. The differences point to gaps, inconsistent implementation, and open questions around categorisation.

• A recent article by Gabrielle Bruney, published in Places Journal, explored the role and decline of public benches in cities, highlighting their social and spatial importance. This article is the latest in a series, Writing the City, a collaboration between Places Journal and the Arts and Culture Program at Columbia Journalism School. For OpenStreetMap this underlines the relevance of detailed mapping of features such as amenity=bench. There is an ongoing proposal (since 2021) for hostile benches as a form of hostile architecture.

Upcoming Events

Country	Where	Venue	What	When
	Sydney	Level 6, 150 George Street, Parramatta	Social Mapping Event in Parramatta :osmcalpic:	2026-04-30
	Essen	Linuxhotel Essen	FOSSGIS-OSM-Communitytreffen im Linuxhotel :osmcalpic:	2026-04-30 - 2026-05-03
	大理市	三月街集市	大理三月民族节 :osmcalpic:	2026-05-01 - 2026-05-07
		Weil der Stadt	MA1PPING :osmcalpic:	2026-05-01
	Augsburg	Augsburger Linux-Infotag 2026	Workshop: JOSM - Java OpenStreetMap Editor - Eine Einführung :osmcalpic:	2026-05-02
	नई दिल्ली	Jitsi Meet (online)	OSM India - Monthly Online Mapathon :osmcalpic:	2026-05-02
		Sovigliana-Vinci	Mappando si Vinci! - 2 Maggio 2026 :osmcalpic:	2026-05-02 - 2026-06-02
	Braunschweig	Stratum 0	Braunschweiger Mappertreffen im Stratum 0 Hackerspace :osmcalpic:	2026-05-05
	Salzburg	Bewohnerservice Elisabeth-Vorstadt	OSM-Treffpunkt :osmcalpic:	2026-05-05
			Missing Maps London Mapathon (with Training) Beginner Friendly (Online) [eng] :osmcalpic:	2026-05-05
			iD Community Chat :osmcalpic:	2026-05-06
	Stuttgart	Stuttgart	Stuttgarter OpenStreetMap-Treffen :osmcalpic:	2026-05-06
	Richmond	Shockoe Bottom	Surveillance mapping with MapRVA :osmcalpic:	2026-05-07
		[online]	🇧🇷 Capacitação OSM 2026 - IVIDES DATA ® - Editor iD - Parte I :osmcalpic:	2026-05-08
		online	SOSM Association Annual Meeting :osmcalpic:	2026-05-08
	København	Cafe Bevar’s	OSMmapperCPH :osmcalpic:	2026-05-10
	Delhi	Kori’s, Humayunpur, Delhi	OSM Delhi Mapping Party No.29 (South Zone) :osmcalpic:	2026-05-10
			Missing Maps : Mapathon en ligne - CartONG [fr] :osmcalpic:	2026-05-11
	Zürich	Bitwäscherei Zürich	187. OSM-Stammtisch Zürich :osmcalpic:	2026-05-11
	臺北市	MozSpace Taipei	OpenStreetMap x Wikidata Taipei #88 :osmcalpic:	2026-05-11
	Magdeburg	Netz39 e.V. , Leibnizstraße 32, 39104 Magdeburg	1. OSM Stammtisch Magdeburg :osmcalpic:	2026-05-12
	Hamburg	Voraussichtlich: “Variable”, Karolinenstraße 23	Hamburger Mappertreffen :osmcalpic:	2026-05-12
		temporärhaus	OSM-Stammtisch Ulm/Neu-Ulm :osmcalpic:	2026-05-12
		Maison des associations de Bayonne - salle Valmont	Rencontre Mapadour :osmcalpic:	2026-05-13
	Praha	Seznam.cz	Pražský mapathon s Lékaři bez hranic v Seznam.cz :osmcalpic:	2026-05-13
	Amsterdam	TomTom HQ	2026 Spring End Maptime :osmcalpic:	2026-05-13
	München	Echardinger Einkehr	Münchner OSM-Treffen :osmcalpic:	2026-05-13
			Mapaton - Marsh :osmcalpic:	2026-05-14
	Žilina	Fakulta riadenia a informatiky UNIZA	Missing Maps mapathon Žilina #22 :osmcalpic:	2026-05-14
		Acireale	Mappiamo le Aci :osmcalpic:	2026-05-16 - 2026-05-17
	Chennai Corporation	Hotel Nithya Amirtham, Mylapore Market, Chennai	Mapping at Mylapore Market, Chennai :osmcalpic:	2026-05-17
	Bologna	aula 0.6, DICAM, Unibo, Viale del Risorgimento 2	Unibo Mapathon OpenStreetMap 2026-05 :osmcalpic:	2026-05-18
	Mannheim	RaumZeitLabor, Mannheim	Rhein-Neckar OpenstreetMap Treffen :osmcalpic:	2026-05-18

This weeklyOSM was produced by [Bastian Greshake Tzovaras](https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/Bastian Greshake Tzovaras), MarcoR, Nakaner, Raquel IVIDES DATA, Raquel IVIDES DATA, SeverinGeo, Strubbl, Andrew Davidson, barefootstache, derFred, izen57, mcliquid.
We welcome link suggestions for the next issue via this form and look forward to your contributions.