State of the Map 2026

Jimpulse

Does OpenStreetMap comply with US executive order naming?

netsharc

Happening at "Cité Descartes". I see what you did there.

hk__2

Of course I learn about it exactly when I’m out of Paris for just a couple of days.

numpad0

Weird little quirk I've recently encountered, somewhat related to OSM: the `mkgmap` tool used to convert OSM data to Garmin map files display Chinese pronunciation as English names next to POI names in Japanese, due to 1) Japanese OSM maps have a lot of entries written in Japanese without indication of language, 2) no one is doing anything about it, due to Wikipedia style community nuances or something, and 3) the tool have no "--assume-language=$LANG" style of options(plus Japanese script->pronunciation mapping isn't even remotely bijective). e.g. There's a bicycle parking next to the parkside exit at Ueno station, "上野駅公園口自転車駐車場". This is: meaning: Ueno station park entrance bicycle parking ground in English, read IRL: ue no eki kouen guchi jitensha chusha jou in Japanese, but written on the map: shang ye yi gong yuan kou zi zhuan che zhu che chang as Chinese(in Pinyin but I don't know how to type it). ...I would imagine that utility of that is limited for non-Japanese users. Makes me wonder what are the reasons why master OSM data hadn't had missing pronunciations autogenerated or mkgmap tool given an auto selected language flag, but I'm not intending to be OSMian nor am I wanting to be the one to define national borders for bunch of nation states, so there's that...

SaudAljuaid

Interesting discussion. I didn’t know OSM handled official naming separately from community naming. Thanks for the explanation.

fitblipper

Contributing to Open Street Map has given me a ton of satisfaction. Knowing that my somewhat minor efforts to correct one address, add one feature, correct one trail will propagate to so many different places and help other people not get lost, find something new, or just be able to navigate more safely in the world makes me feel like I am leaving the world a better place more than a decade of working at FANG ever did.

c0nsumer

I absolutely love OpenStreetMap. Back when I first started building (legal) mountain bike trails I realized that without a map they aren't the most useful. OSM gave me the system in which to document them, and then from there I was able to reuse the data to make print maps and eventually my current project: https://trailmaps.app

hrnnnnnn

If you want a fun and easy way to contribute to OSM I recommend StreetComplete. You get a bunch of game-like quest icons for things like "what is the surface of this path?", and "does this road have a cycle path?", then you walk around and fill them in. Very satisfying and feels like you're doing something actually useful. Also nudges you to visit parts of your neighborhood you might never have been to before.

thangalin

https://shufflenblues.com/location/ I used OpenStreetMaps to create a map with a theme that fits the website theme. There were no other free options that I could find to accomplish this goal. Moreover, the map works on just about every browser under the sun. Great work by their team.

michaefe

Michelin being a higher tier sponsor than Esri is interesting

VCFundedGenYer

Love OpenStreetMap. It's kept my 15-20 year old Garmin devices alive for far longer than its parent company expected them to live.

basil

Gamifying the map definitely helps to pull in contributors. StreetComplete got me editing more than anything else. I went a bit sideways with it: I used OSM data to build a territory game for cyclists, where you claim roads by riding them. It's heavily processed OSM data with PostGIS. The fun part was figuring out how to decide what counts as a claimable road in the first place. https://remap.earth

dhx

For the panel discussion "Why do you contribute to OSM?" one of the questions sought to be understood is "What stops or demotivates you to contribute (more) to OSM?".[1] My response would be the incorrect application amongst the OSM community of sweat-of-the-brow doctrine in copyright law within jurisdictions it very clearly doesn't apply.[2][3] I hazard a guess some of this incorrect application comes from large companies becoming involved in OSM, and they've signed unrelated enterprise agreements with the likes of Google, or whoever. Within those agreements there may be private agreements that the companies cannot redistribute data of Google (or whoever) without explicit permission. The companies contributing to OSM don't want to have to navigate this problem when they contribute to OSM and would prefer OSM incorrectly applies sweat-of-the-brow doctrine to exclude any non-copyrightable but otherwise "problematic" data (to themselves only) that the likes of Google could possibly argue were obtained through their enterprise agreement. I also hazard a guess there are numerous OSM community members that strongly hold copy-left views of their contributions. They want/need the sweat-of-the-brow doctrine to be able to control consumers of OSM data (not necessarily just rendered tile maps) as in the example of [5]. In this example, someone complains that a third party brand extracted 100k+ water tap coordinates from OSM and added them to Google Maps. I also hazard a guess there are some small number of vocal OSM community members that hate "armchair mapping", or want to keep new mappers out of areas they're trying to control, and raising licensing disputes can be a convenient way to encourage such mappers to stay away. If the mapper disputes the claim, it'll probably just fall back to "None of are lawyers so we err on the side of extreme caution". And hence tragedy of the anticommons tends to result. Some ridiculous examples I've come across: - Franchise website lists store locations with Google Maps Place IDs only. OSM community members get in a panic because someone opened up every link to determine the address or coordinates of each store, then add store locations to OSM. Somehow they fear a copyright infringement has occurred, even though case law in most major jurisdictions very clearly demonstrates factual data (such as address of a store or coordinates of a store) is not copyrightable. - Government department publishes some dataset, let's say a shapefile of points of park benches, under a CC-BY licence. They then host public competitions and conferences encouraging people to use the data and create apps and websites based on it. OSM community members panic because the government department hasn't also signed an OSM-specific form or otherwise provided approval that explicitly permits OSM's website to show attribution as just "OSM contributors" with a link to a page that lists the government department amongst 100's of others. As opposed to the bottom of openstreetmap.org having a list of 100,000+ individual contributors. No one stopped to question whether a shapefile of points of park benches could even be copyrightable in the first place. And the government department never responds to a request to clarify how they should be attributed because no one thought of that question when using the CC-BY license. - Someone on the ground walks past a restaurant with opening hours published on the window and enters them into OSM. Or they visit the restaurant's website to learn what their opening hours are, and enters them into OSM. Oh no! Has there been a copyright infringement? As far as I'm aware, [4] is probably the most official OSM position resolving some of these sweat-of-the-brow problems. However, other OSM Foundation and Wiki pages are in conflict and would typically scare many community members away from contributing per the examples provided above (e.g. contain strong vague statements such as (paraphrased) "Do not copy features from other maps to OSM"). Additionally, the example of [5] indicates OSM chasing up consumers of OSM data for supposed lack of attribution, and seemingly relying on non-existent (in many jurisdictions) sweat-of-the-brow doctrine to do so. Copyright law is severley broken with the invention of AI so I guess we'll have to wait and see how jurisdictions change their copyright laws for AI. And then by extension, maybe some of these sweat-of-the-brow ambiguities for mapping/databases may finally be better resolved. [1] https://2026.stateofthemap.org/sessions/GXXCFE/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweat_of_the_brow [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_of_originality [4] https://osmfoundation.org/wiki/Licensing_Working_Group/Minut... [5] https://osmfoundation.org/wiki/Licensing_Working_Group/Minut...

juliansimioni

It’s really a great conference, the OSM community is great and strongest in Europe. I’ve been to many and always come away inspired. Sadly (or, really, amazingly as it’s good to have so many options), another great, major geospatial conference is also happening essentially at the same time: FOSS4G in Hiroshima. They are certainly different conferences but a lot of overlap. So, in other words it’s a great week to be in geospatial software working on open source and open data.