weekly – semanario – hebdo – 週刊 – týdeník – Wochennotiz – 주간 – tygodnik – A summary of things happening in the OpenStreetMap world

07/05/2026-13/05/2026

[1] A walking tracker for Apple watchOS | © David Smith | map data © by OpenStreetMap Contributors.

Mapping

Comments are requested on this proposal:
- data_center:tier, data_center:total_power, data_center:IT_power, data_center:IT_area, proposed by LunaLune, to extend telecom=data_center features with standardised technical attributes such as redundancy tier, total power capacity, IT load (or the maximum electrical power available for IT equipment, as servers, storage, networking), and usable IT area (or the total floor area exclusively used for IT equipment).
‘Aerodrome Descriptive Tags’, proposed by Telegram Sam, is up for vote until Tuesday 26 May, which aims to add descriptive tags for aerodrome=* and better describe these features. It proposes distinct tags for type, usage, access, sport, and international traffic, as well as dedicated values for airstrip, heliport, and seaplane_base.

Community

In a video Anne-Karoline Distel showed which objects hikers can add to OpenStreetMap, while on the trail, using OsmAnd. Examples include benches, route markers, viewpoints, shelters, fords, and safety-related facilities.
Raquel Dezidério Souto published, on her OSM user diary, about her participation as a special speaker at an event organised by the Pedagogical University of Maputo (Mozambique), which discussed changes to the country’s environmental law. During the event, she took the opportunity to highlight the importance of open data and the use of open collaborative mapping platforms, with a special focus on OpenStreetMap. A copy of the special keynote entitled ‘Development and Conservation’ is available on Zenodo.org.
9tab wrote about some addr:place inconsistencies on the OpenStreetMap Wiki. Use of the addr:place key can differ from the (contradictory) descriptions in the Wiki, notably in relation to the addr:street key.
A new two-year comparative study in Denmark demonstrates that the Danish OSM community produces geodata roughly nine times more efficiently than the government-led GeoFA project ►. Based on a two-year tracking of 38 distinct outdoor and cultural data categories, OSM Denmark maintains a significant lead, accounting for over 145,000 recorded items.
In their latest OpenStreetMap interview series, OpenCage spoke with Volker Krause about Transitous, an open platform for public transport routing.
The MapComplete project reported that more than 20,000 changesets have been created with the tool in 2026 so far. At the same time, the panoramax=* key has surpassed 100,000 uses in OpenStreetMap, most of them added via MapComplete and linking to content in the Panoramax ecosystem.
As reported by Ivan Branco on the OpenStreetMap Community forum, on 1 May, the twelfth issue of mensileOSM , the Italian-language monthly newsletter for Italy’s OpenStreetMap community was published. This issue also marks the project’s first anniversary.
Thomas D. has started a discussion on the OpenStreetMap Community forum about possible collaboration between the OpenStreetMap community and the organisation Open Lunar Foundation on an open-source Moon map. The initiative is motivated by renewed lunar activity and existing ideas around collaborative mapping of the Moon.
OpenStreetMap US is collaborating with the Environmental Policy Innovation Center on OpenWetlandsMap, an open dataset of wetlands in the United States. The project aims to complement outdated and fragmented data with up-to-date, community-driven OSM mapping to support conservation and decision-making.
Using Altilunium Locationpad, rphyrin has created some maps representing the 2018 journey of a Hajj pilgrim group, tracing the pilgrims’ route from departure to completion.
Andy Townsend explores what the lifecycle tag disused=yes in OpenStreetMap actually means.

Local chapter news

OpenStreetMap US has welcomed the Yesterdays as a new Charter Project. The platform enables volunteers to georeference historical photographs and collaboratively map past cityscapes using OpenStreetMap and historical sources. The project began in Richmond, Virginia, where the Charter Project Advisory Committee is based.

Events

The OpenStreetMap Foundation has made a call for bids to host the 2027 State of the Map conference. Applications are open until Sunday 19 July, with the selected host to be announced during SotM 2026 in Paris.

Education

The 2026 ‘OpenStreetMap Workshop Series’, organised by IVIDES DATA (Brazil), has kicked off with participants from Portuguese-speaking countries Brazil, Mozambique, and Angola. The organisers have made available a PDF copy (in Portuguese) and a link to the presentation video, as well as the uMap showing the home cities of the participants.

Maps

David Smith recounted his six-year-long journey designing the OSM-based map in Pedometer++, a walking tracker for Apple watchOS, built with help from Andy Allan.
Transform Transport has published an interactive ’15 Minute City Score’ map analysing access to essential services across European cities. The analysis uses OpenStreetMap data for pedestrian networks and amenities, applying consistent spatial methods for comparability.
Using the OSM-ALKIS address comparison web app, Alex Spritze analysed the distribution of missing address data across Saxony-Anhalt. The results highlighted significant disparities between municipalities, ranging from high-performing areas such as Ingersleben, which has ‘only’ nine missing addresses, to municipalities like Güsten, where just 3.8% of addresses are currently mapped in OpenStreetMap.

OSM in action

The Syrian Ministry of Tourism has developed the Syrian Tourist Map, a web map based on OpenStreetMap data that shows the locations of attractions, tourist facilities, and investment opportunities in Syria.

Software

HeiGIT presented its new Traffic Emissions tool in the Climate Action Navigator that combines OpenStreetMap road data and machine learning to map road traffic-related CO₂ emissions and air pollutants at street level across Germany, helping cities better understand where climate action is most urgently needed.
Grid2Poster is a new open source tool that renders electrical transmission networks from OpenStreetMap data as print-ready posters. This Python-based project uses GeoPandas, OSMnx, and Matplotlib, and supports country, regional, and continent-scale maps with transmission lines, cables, and optional administrative boundaries. The project is heavily inspired and reused styling from maptoposter.
Tobias Jordans has released Grenzabgleich, a web tool comparing OpenStreetMap administrative boundaries with official datasets in Germany. It calculates metrics such as IoU and Hausdorff distances to highlight discrepancies and help mappers prioritise review and improve boundary data quality.
The OpenStreetMap-based project CoMaps reported major technical updates, including migration to Swift and Material 3 and automated map generation. The goal was improved maintainability, performance, and long-term sustainability for the app.
CoMaps celebrated its first birthday and the team has looked back on its growing community, big new features and what comes next.
HeiGIT presented the new user statistics available in ohsomeNOW, giving OpenStreetMap users deeper insights into contributor activity histories and supporting the analysis of organised editing patterns.
The OpenStreetMap Operations Team has heavily rate-limited QGIS’s access to tile.openstreetmap.org after bulk tile usage risked disrupting the service for other users. The OSM and QGIS teams are working on ways to separate bulk downloads from normal interactive usage. OpenStreetMap is also seeking donated servers to expand tile rendering capacity.
Sean Carapella has launched PaddleMap, a routing and mapping tool for watercraft built on BRouter and brouter-web. It supports routing along waterways and portages and highlights paddling-related POIs such as access points, dams, and rapids.
Trailmaps.app is a new web project that turns OpenStreetMap data into mobile-friendly offline maps of mountain bike trail networks. These maps are designed to match local trail signage instead of generic difficulty colouring, and the related map generator has been published as open source. According to the developer, the entire project was largely created with the help of Claude AI.
A new userscript now allows users to add multiple custom background layers to iD. Instead of switching a single custom URL repeatedly, mappers can now easily toggle between several tile sources.
Manny Fred has introduced HydrantMap, a new web project created by Fabian Flodman to visualise and maintain hydrant data from OpenStreetMap. The platform was inspired by the idea of OsmHydrant, focusing on up-to-date data, mobile usability, and a maintainable, modern technical foundation.

Programming

darkonus invited JOSM users to test their ‘Fillet Tools’, a plugin that can round way corners, similar to the fillet tool in CAD software. The author is seeking feedback, bug reports, cases of unusual behaviour, and suggestions. The plugin can be installed manually from the version 0.1.0 release on GitLab.
Matija Nalis shared his experience of setting up a Panoramax instance for OSM-HR, including hardware, Docker setup, and OSM OAuth2 integration. His report provides practical insights into deployment, operation, and challenges of hosting image infrastructure.
Christian Quest has shared concrete figures on the memory requirements for a Panoramax instance on the Forum GéoCommuns. The analysis shows that 360° images in particular significantly increase the demand and memory optimisations are planned.
The OpenStreetMap Operations Working Group has updated the Nominatim usage policy. The changes further restrict automated usage and introduce initial guidelines for AI applications and ‘vibe coding’. Reselling geocoding results from Nominatim is now prohibited.

Releases

Nico Isenbeck’s onroutemap.de underwent some improvements in March and April:
- March: The software was made available in French and Spanish and personal favourites can now be exported as KML and GPX.
- April: The addition of a real-time wind gust layer on the map with current gust (Open-Meteo) speed and direction, colour-coded according to the Beaufort Scale. The most important new feature, however, was the migration from Overpass to PostGIS, resulting in much better map generation performance.
Marcus Jaschen hinted at several new updates for bikerouter.de coming in version 2026.11.
Martin Raifer tooted about the release of iD 2.40, which introduces a new style for shared bicycle and pedestrian paths and dynamic detail levels for circular features. The update also changes preset handling, automatically removing tags that are not valid for the newly selected preset.
The OsmAnd team has released version 1.03 of OsmAnd Web. New features include Garmin Connect integration for automatic activity syncing, ‘Smart Folders’ for tracks, improved POI information, and redesigned tools for managing and displaying GPX tracks and favourites.
The OSRM project has released version 26.5.0 of osrm-backend. This release added Python bindings to the main repository, migrated the build system to vcpkg, reduced Boost dependencies, added support for winter_road and ice_road in routing profiles, along with many other improvements.
Project OSRM tooted that they are experimenting with an isochrone endpoint. The feature has not yet been released but could in future support reachability analysis based on OSRM routing.
Martijn van Exel has released version 0.8.2 of his Python Overpass library. This update now requires applications to set a user-agent header, helping to protect the Overpass API from problematic requests.
CoMaps released version 2026.05.06. From this version onward map versions will no longer be hard-tied to an app version, allowing users to update their maps without first having to update the app. This will allow for an increased update frequency for maps, which will now be weekly.
The Organic Maps team has released version 2026.05.08-4, which now allows you to view public transport routes at stops on a map. It also includes updated OpenStreetMap data, improved elevation charts, optimised map downloads, and many other improvements. You can read the detailed announcement on their blog.

Did you know that …

… there is a browser extension that adds an ‘Edit Tags’ button to every object on osm.org?

OSM in the media

CHIP has published a commentary describing ► OpenStreetMap as much more useful than Google Maps when looking for nearby places in an unfamiliar area. The article says OSM shows more detail about shops, places, and amenities, while Google Maps leaves visible gaps in the example used.

Other “geo” things

Caleb Robinson and Isaac Corley have blogged about using a Gaussian splat approach to sharpen images from Sentinel-2. The method works by using the slight variation in the location of pixels between the different passes of the satellite to extract more information from the images.
The Ordnance Survey and GeoPlace have demanded the removal of millions of openly published UK council tax address records, claiming intellectual property rights on behalf of the Ordnance Survey, GeoPlace, and the Royal Mail. The affected datasets had previously been released under open licences by 57 local authorities.
The latest Garmin TopoActive Europe 2026.10 map update, based on OpenStreetMap data, is causing serious routing issues on multiple devices, including crashes ► and boot loops. Several Edge models are affected; as a workaround, Garmin currently recommends downgrading to an earlier map version.

Upcoming Events

Where	Venue	What	When
		OSMF Engineering Working Group meeting	2026-05-15
	Acireale	Mappiamo le Aci	2026-05-16 – 2026-05-17
New York	East River Park at Corlears Hook	NYC Mapper Picnic	2026-05-17
Chennai Corporation	Hotel Nithya Amirtham, Mylapore Market, Chennai	Mapping at Mylapore Market, Chennai	2026-05-17
Bologna	aula 0.6, DICAM, Unibo, Viale del Risorgimento 2	Unibo Mapathon OpenStreetMap 2026-05	2026-05-18
Mannheim	RaumZeitLabor, Mannheim	Rhein-Neckar OpenstreetMap Treffen	2026-05-18
		Webinaire de sensibilisation à OpenStreetMap pour les collectivités	2026-05-19
		Missing Maps London Mid-Month (Without Training) Advanced Mappers [eng]	2026-05-19
Greater London	Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF UK) Office	Missing Maps London In-Person Mapathon	2026-05-19
Lyon	Tubà	~~Réunion du groupe local de Lyon~~	2026-05-19
Bonn	Dotty’s	200. OSM-Stammtisch Bonn	2026-05-19
Chemnitz	Kaffeesatz, Chemnitz	OSM-Stammtisch Chemnitz	2026-05-19
	Online	Lüneburger Mappertreffen (online)	2026-05-19
	MJC de Vienne	Rencontre des contributeurs de Vienne (38)	2026-05-20
		Online Missing Maps Mapathon ÄRZTE OHNE GRENZEN (AT/DE)	2026-05-20
Karlsruhe	Chiang Mai	Stammtisch Karlsruhe	2026-05-20
	[online]	🇧🇷 Capacitação OSM 2026 – IVIDES DATA ® – Editor iD – Parte II	2026-05-22
Metz	l’Arob@se	Atelier du groupe local de Metz – Cartographions les services publics !	2026-05-23
Ferrara	Ferrara	Raccolta dati aree verdi @ Giornata Mondiale della Biodiversità 2026 – Citizen Science Ferrara	2026-05-23
Navi Mumbai		OSM Mumbai Mapping Party No.10 (Trans-Harbour Line – North)	2026-05-23
Bologna	Velostazione ExDynamo	Compleanno di Wikipedia a Bologna 2026, con wikigita e mapping party in Bolognina e pranzo alla velostazione	2026-05-24
		Missing Maps : Mapathon en ligne – CartONG [fr]	2026-05-25
Lyon	Tubà	Réunion du groupe local de Lyon	2026-05-26
Berlin	Online	OSM-Verkehrswende #75	2026-05-26
Düsseldorf	Online bei https://meet.jit.si/OSM-DUS-2026	Düsseldorfer OpenStreetMap-Treffen (online)	2026-05-27
Würzburg	FabLab Würzburg	Würzburger OSM-Treffen	2026-05-27
		OSMF Engineering Working Group meeting	2026-05-29
Bad Harzburg	Bad Harzburg	Braunschweiger OSM-Treffen Mappingtour: Zusammen Bad Harzburg mappen	2026-05-30