7 things I didn’t know about OpenStreetMap

This is going to be a list-post, a must-have item on blogs as I read recently.

Last week I attended Richard Weait‘s OpenStreetMap presentation at the Boston LUG. He gave a good overview on what OSM is about, why it’s so fascinating and showed how to participate. Even though I’m a bit familiar with OSM for some time now, I learned a couple of new things about OpenStreetMap:

1. North America is only covered superficial. It looks good on a small scale, large areas appear mapped in OSM, but as you zoom in and look at it more closely you’ll find many problems. I’m not sure if motivation would be higher if people start mapping from scratch and “create” their own maps of their places instead of working on existing data and fix errors. On the other hand, the AND data donation of Indian and Chinese road data (mostly of poor quality) helped to create awareness and interest in mapping those countries, as some people mentioned during the discussion.
2. Germany has the largest OSM community. Not surprising that this country is among the first ones where OSM is integrated into business models (e.g. Geofabrik, WhereGroup or GDV).
3. Open Database License: the idea of Creative Commons transferred to suit database licensing.
4. “Edit wars” taking place in Cyprus about the default place names, shell scripts vs. manual edits.
5. OpenPisteMap: an OSM side project for ski slopes which adds hill shading and contour lines to OSM. One might think that it’s Austria’s #1 mapping project. Well, I’m afraid that’s not the case. Apparently not many fellow citizens have ever heard of it because we look like a desert in terms of available ski slopes at OpenPisteMap. Shame on us!
6. If you discover OSM flaws and can’t fix them directly on the map, then just go to and add a note in OpenStreetBugs.
7. Another interesting OpenStreetMap routing service I didn’t know before. It even considers elevation profiles for cyclists or pedestrians where available.

The parts of Cambridge I know so far are mapped fine (was a MassGIS data donation). The only thing I’m doing here in OSM is adding bike lanes to existing streets in my neighborhood. Since I really enjoy exploring this place by bike, that’s probably the most useful map layer to me.