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OpenStreetMap (abbreviated OSM) is a free,
open Open or OPEN may refer to: Music * Open (band), Australian pop/rock band * The Open (band), English indie rock band * ''Open'' (Blues Image album), 1969 * ''Open'' (Gerd Dudek, Buschi Niebergall, and Edward Vesala album), 1979 * ''Open'' (Go ...
map database updated and maintained by a community of
volunteers Volunteering is an elective and freely chosen act of an individual or group giving their time and labor, often for community service. Many volunteers are specifically trained in the areas they work, such as medicine, education, or emergenc ...
via
open collaboration Open collaboration refers to any "system of innovation or production that relies on goal-oriented yet loosely coordinated participants who cooperate voluntarily to create a product (or service) of economic value, which is made freely available to ...
. Contributors collect data from surveys, trace from aerial photo imagery or
satellite imagery Satellite images (also Earth observation imagery, spaceborne photography, or simply satellite photo) are images of Earth collected by imaging satellites operated by governments and businesses around the world. Satellite imaging companies sell im ...
, and import from other freely licensed geodata sources. OpenStreetMap is freely licensed under the Open Database License and is commonly used to make electronic maps, inform turn-by-turn navigation, and assist in
humanitarian aid Humanitarian aid is material and Humanitarian Logistics, logistic assistance, usually in the short-term, to people in need. Among the people in need are the homelessness, homeless, refugees, and victims of natural disasters, wars, and famines. Th ...
and data visualisation. OpenStreetMap uses its own data model to store geographical features which can then be exported into other GIS file formats. The OpenStreetMap website itself is an online map, geodata
search engine A search engine is a software system that provides hyperlinks to web pages, and other relevant information on World Wide Web, the Web in response to a user's web query, query. The user enters a query in a web browser or a mobile app, and the sea ...
, and editor. OpenStreetMap was created by Steve Coast in response to the
Ordnance Survey The Ordnance Survey (OS) is the national mapping agency for Great Britain. The agency's name indicates its original military purpose (see Artillery, ordnance and surveying), which was to map Scotland in the wake of the Jacobite rising of ...
, the United Kingdom's national mapping agency, failing to release its data to the public under free licences in 2004. Initially, maps in OSM were created only via GPS traces, but it was quickly populated by importing
public domain The public domain (PD) consists of all the creative work to which no Exclusive exclusive intellectual property rights apply. Those rights may have expired, been forfeited, expressly Waiver, waived, or may be inapplicable. Because no one holds ...
geographical data such as the U.S.
TIGER The tiger (''Panthera tigris'') is a large Felidae, cat and a member of the genus ''Panthera'' native to Asia. It has a powerful, muscular body with a large head and paws, a long tail and orange fur with black, mostly vertical stripes. It is ...
and by tracing imagery as permitted by source. OpenStreetMap's adoption was accelerated by
Google Maps Google Maps is a web mapping platform and consumer application offered by Google. It offers satellite imagery, aerial photography, street maps, 360° interactive panorama, interactive panoramic views of streets (Google Street View, Street View ...
's introduction of pricing in 2012 and the development of supporting software and applications. The database is hosted by the OpenStreetMap Foundation, a non-profit organisation registered in
England and Wales England and Wales () is one of the Law of the United Kingdom#Legal jurisdictions, three legal jurisdictions of the United Kingdom. It covers the constituent countries England and Wales and was formed by the Laws in Wales Acts 1535 and 1542. Th ...
and is funded mostly via donations.


History

Steve Coast founded the project in 2004 while attending
University College London University College London (Trade name, branded as UCL) is a Public university, public research university in London, England. It is a Member institutions of the University of London, member institution of the Federal university, federal Uni ...
, initially focusing on mapping the United Kingdom. In the UK and elsewhere, government-run and tax-funded projects like the
Ordnance Survey The Ordnance Survey (OS) is the national mapping agency for Great Britain. The agency's name indicates its original military purpose (see Artillery, ordnance and surveying), which was to map Scotland in the wake of the Jacobite rising of ...
created massive datasets but declined to freely and widely distribute them. The first contribution was a street that Coast entered in December 2004 after cycling around
Regent's Park Regent's Park (officially The Regent's Park) is one of the Royal Parks of London. It occupies in north-west Inner London, administratively split between the City of Westminster and the London Borough of Camden, Borough of Camden (and historical ...
in
London London is the Capital city, capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of both England and the United Kingdom, with a population of in . London metropolitan area, Its wider metropolitan area is the largest in Wester ...
with a GPS tracking unit. In April 2006, the OpenStreetMap Foundation was established to encourage the growth, development and distribution of free
geospatial Geographic data and information is defined in the ISO/TC 211 series of standards as data and information having an implicit or explicit association with a location relative to Earth (a geographic location or geographic position). It is also call ...
data and provide geospatial data for anybody to use and share. In April 2007, Automotive Navigation Data (AND) donated a complete road data set for the
Netherlands , Terminology of the Low Countries, informally Holland, is a country in Northwestern Europe, with Caribbean Netherlands, overseas territories in the Caribbean. It is the largest of the four constituent countries of the Kingdom of the Nether ...
and
trunk road A trunk road is a major highway with a specific legal classification in some jurisdictions, notably the United Kingdom, Sweden and formerly Ireland. Trunk roads are planned and managed at the national-level, distinguishing them from non-trunk ro ...
data for
India India, officially the Republic of India, is a country in South Asia. It is the List of countries and dependencies by area, seventh-largest country by area; the List of countries by population (United Nations), most populous country since ...
and
China China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. With population of China, a population exceeding 1.4 billion, it is the list of countries by population (United Nations), second-most populous country after ...
to the project. By July 2007, when the first "The State of the Map" (SotM) conference was held, there were 9,000 registered users. In October 2007, OpenStreetMap completed the import of a US Census
TIGER The tiger (''Panthera tigris'') is a large Felidae, cat and a member of the genus ''Panthera'' native to Asia. It has a powerful, muscular body with a large head and paws, a long tail and orange fur with black, mostly vertical stripes. It is ...
road dataset. In December 2007,
Oxford University The University of Oxford is a collegiate research university in Oxford, England. There is evidence of teaching as early as 1096, making it the oldest university in the English-speaking world and the second-oldest continuously operating u ...
became the first major organisation to use OpenStreetMap data on their main website. Ways to import and export data have continued to grow – by 2008, the project developed tools to export OpenStreetMap data to power portable GPS units, replacing their existing proprietary and out-of-date maps. In March 2008, two founders of CloudMade, a commercial company that uses OpenStreetMap data, announced that they had received
venture capital Venture capital (VC) is a form of private equity financing provided by firms or funds to start-up company, startup, early-stage, and emerging companies, that have been deemed to have high growth potential or that have demonstrated high growth in ...
funding of €2.4million. In 2010, AOL launched an OSM-based version of MapQuest and committed $ to increasing OSM's coverage of local communities for its Patch website. In 2012, the launch of pricing for
Google Maps Google Maps is a web mapping platform and consumer application offered by Google. It offers satellite imagery, aerial photography, street maps, 360° interactive panorama, interactive panoramic views of streets (Google Street View, Street View ...
led several prominent websites to switch from their service to OpenStreetMap and other competitors. Chief among these were Foursquare and Craigslist, which adopted OpenStreetMap, and
Apple An apple is a round, edible fruit produced by an apple tree (''Malus'' spp.). Fruit trees of the orchard or domestic apple (''Malus domestica''), the most widely grown in the genus, are agriculture, cultivated worldwide. The tree originated ...
, which ended a contract with Google and launched a self-built mapping platform using TomTom and OpenStreetMap data. As of 2025, TomTom,
Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...
,
Esri Environmental Systems Research Institute, Inc., doing business as Esri (), is an American Multinational corporation, multinational geographic information system (GIS) software company headquartered in Redlands, California. It is best known for ...
and Meta are the highest-tier corporate sponsors of the OpenStreetMap Foundation.


Content

The OSM project aims to collect data about stationary objects throughout the world, including
infrastructure Infrastructure is the set of facilities and systems that serve a country, city, or other area, and encompasses the services and facilities necessary for its economy, households and firms to function. Infrastructure is composed of public and pri ...
and other aspects of the
built environment The term built environment refers to human-made conditions and is often used in architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning, public health, sociology, and anthropology, among others. These curated spaces provide the setting for human ac ...
, points of interest,
land use Land use is an umbrella term to describe what happens on a parcel of land. It concerns the benefits derived from using the land, and also the land management actions that humans carry out there. The following categories are used for land use: fo ...
and cover classifications, and
topography Topography is the study of the forms and features of land surfaces. The topography of an area may refer to the landforms and features themselves, or a description or depiction in maps. Topography is a field of geoscience and planetary sci ...
. Map features range in scale from international boundaries to hyperlocal details such as shops and
street furniture Street furniture is a collective term for objects and pieces of equipment installed along streets and roads for various purposes. It includes bench (furniture), benches, traffic barriers, bollards, post boxes, phone boxes, streetlamps, traffic ...
. Although historically significant features and ongoing construction projects are routinely included in the database, the project's scope is limited to the present day, as opposed to the past or future.


Data structure

OSM's data model differs markedly from that of a conventional GIS or CAD system. It is a
topological Topology (from the Greek words , and ) is the branch of mathematics concerned with the properties of a geometric object that are preserved under continuous deformations, such as stretching, twisting, crumpling, and bending; that is, wit ...
data structure In computer science, a data structure is a data organization and storage format that is usually chosen for Efficiency, efficient Data access, access to data. More precisely, a data structure is a collection of data values, the relationships amo ...
without the formal concept of a layer, allowing thematically diverse data to commingle and interconnect. A map feature or ''element'' is modelled as one of three
geometric primitive In vector computer graphics, CAD systems, and geographic information systems, a geometric primitive (or prim) is the simplest (i.e. 'atomic' or irreducible) geometric shape that the system can handle (draw, store). Sometimes the subroutines ...
s: * A ''node'' is a point with a geographic coordinate expressed in the WGS 84 coordinate system. A standalone node represents a point of interest, such as a mountain peak. * A ''way'' is an ordered list of nodes that represents a
polyline In geometry, a polygonal chain is a connected series of line segments. More formally, a polygonal chain is a curve specified by a sequence of points (A_1, A_2, \dots, A_n) called its vertices. The curve itself consists of the line segments co ...
or
polygon In geometry, a polygon () is a plane figure made up of line segments connected to form a closed polygonal chain. The segments of a closed polygonal chain are called its '' edges'' or ''sides''. The points where two edges meet are the polygon ...
, depending on its metadata and whether it forms a closed ring. A way can represent either a linear feature, such as a street or river, or an area, such as a forest, park, parking lot, or lake. Multiple ways can share a node to represent a connection, for instance, a street intersection or a
confluence In geography, a confluence (also ''conflux'') occurs where two or more watercourses join to form a single channel (geography), channel. A confluence can occur in several configurations: at the point where a tributary joins a larger river (main ...
of two rivers. The node itself can simultaneously represent another feature, for example, an entrance that connects a footway to a building. Until 2007, a way was formally composed of explicit '' segments'' between pairs of nodes. * A ''relation'' is an ordered list of nodes, ways and other relations (together called ''members''). A relation can optionally specify the ''role'' of each of its members. Relations form complex geometries or represent abstract relationships among members. Examples include turn restrictions on roads, routes that span several existing ways (for instance, a long-distance motorway), and areas with holes. Multiple relations can contain the same member to represent an overlap, for example, a route concurrency or two adjoining political boundaries. The OpenStreetMap data primitives are stored and processed in different formats. OpenStreetMap server uses
PostgreSQL PostgreSQL ( ) also known as Postgres, is a free and open-source software, free and open-source relational database management system (RDBMS) emphasizing extensibility and SQL compliance. PostgreSQL features transaction processing, transactions ...
database In computing, a database is an organized collection of data or a type of data store based on the use of a database management system (DBMS), the software that interacts with end users, applications, and the database itself to capture and a ...
, with one table for each data primitive, with individual objects stored as rows. The data structure is defined as part of the OSM API. The current version of the API, v0.6, was released in 2009. A 2023 study found that this version's changes to the relation data structure had the effect of reducing the total number of relations; however, it simultaneously lowered the barrier to creating new relations and spurred the application of relations to new use cases.


"Any tags you like"

OSM manages metadata as a
folksonomy Folksonomy is a classification system in which end users apply public tags to online items, typically to make those items easier for themselves or others to find later. Over time, this can give rise to a classification system based on those tag ...
. Each element contains key-value pairs, called '' tags'', that identify and describe the feature. A recommended
ontology Ontology is the philosophical study of existence, being. It is traditionally understood as the subdiscipline of metaphysics focused on the most general features of reality. As one of the most fundamental concepts, being encompasses all of realit ...
of map features (the meaning of ''tags'') is maintained on a wiki. New tagging schemes can always be proposed by a popular vote of a written proposal in OpenStreetMap wiki, however, there is no requirement to follow this process: editors are free to use any tags they like to describe a feature. There are over 89 million different kinds of tags in use as of June 2017.


Coverage

OpenStreetMap data has been favourably compared with proprietary datasources, although data quality varied across the world. A study in 2011 compared OSM data with TomTom for Germany. For car navigation TomTom has 9% more information, while for the entire street network, OSM has 27% more information. In 2011,
TriMet The Tri-County Metropolitan Transportation District of Oregon (TriMet) is a Transit district, transit agency that serves most of the Oregon part of the Portland metropolitan area. Created in 1969 by the Oregon Legislative Assembly, Oregon legi ...
, which serves the Portland, Oregon, metropolitan area, found that OSM's street data, consumed through the routing engine OpenTripPlanner and the search engine Apache Solr, yields better results than analogous GIS datasets managed by local government agencies. A 2021 study compared the ''OpenStreetMap Carto'' style's symbology to that of the
Soviet Union The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR), commonly known as the Soviet Union, was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 until Dissolution of the Soviet ...
's comprehensive military mapping programme, finding that OSM matched the Soviet maps in coverage of some features such as road infrastructure but gave less prominence to the natural environment. A study from 2021 found the mean completeness of shop data in the German regions Baden-Württemberg and Saxony to be 88% and 82% respectively. Instead of comparing OSM data to other datasets, the authors looked at how the number of shops developed over time. They then determined the expected number of shops by estimating the saturation level. According to a 2024 study using PyPSA, OSM has the most detailed and up-to-date publicly available coverage of the European high-voltage electrical grid, comparable to official data from the
European Network of Transmission System Operators for Electricity The European Network of Transmission System Operators for Electricity (ENTSO-E) is an association representing 40 electricity transmission system operators (TSOs) from 36 countries across Europe, thus extending beyond EU borders. It manages the ...
.


License

All data added to the project needs to have a licence compatible with the Open Data Commons Open Database Licence (ODbL). This can include out-of-copyright information, public domain or other licences. Software used in the production and presentation of OpenStreetMap data may have separate licensing terms. OpenStreetMap data and derived tiles were originally published under the
Creative Commons Creative Commons (CC) is an American non-profit organization and international network devoted to educational access and expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has release ...
Attribution-ShareAlike licence (CC BY-SA) with the intention of promoting free use and redistribution of the data. In September 2012, the licence was changed to the ODbL in order to define its bearing on data rather than representation more specifically. As part of this relicensing process, some of the map data was removed from the public distribution. This included all data contributed by members that did not agree to the new licensing terms, as well as all subsequent edits to those affected objects. It also included any data contributed based on input data that was not compatible with the new terms. Estimates suggested that over 97% of data would be retained globally, but certain regions would be affected more than others, such as in Australia where 24 to 84% of objects would be retained, depending on the type of object. Ultimately, more than 99% of the data was retained, with Australia and Poland being the countries most severely affected by the change. The license change and resulting deletions prompted a group of dissenting mappers to establish Free Open Street Map (FOSM), a fork of OSM that remained under the previous license. Map tiles provided by the OpenStreetMap project were licensed under CC-BY-SA-2.0 until 1 August 2020. The ODbL license requires attribution to be attached to maps produced from OpenStreetMap data, but does not require that any particular license be applied to those maps. "©OpenStreetMap Contributors" with link to ODbL copyright page as attribution requirement is used on the site.


Distribution

OSM publishes official database dumps of the entire "planet" for reuse on minutely and weekly intervals, formatted as
XML Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing data. It defines a set of rules for encoding electronic document, documents in a format that is both human-readable and Machine-r ...
or binary Protocol Buffers. Alternative third-party distributions provide access to OSM data in other formats or to more manageable subsets of the data. Geofabrik publishes extracts of the database in OSM and shapefile formats for individual countries and political subdivisions.
Amazon Web Services Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) is a subsidiary of Amazon.com, Amazon that provides Software as a service, on-demand cloud computing computing platform, platforms and Application programming interface, APIs to individuals, companies, and gover ...
publishes the planet on S3 for querying in
Athena Athena or Athene, often given the epithet Pallas, is an ancient Greek religion, ancient Greek goddess associated with wisdom, warfare, and handicraft who was later syncretism, syncretized with the Roman goddess Minerva. Athena was regarde ...
. As part of the QLever project, the
University of Freiburg The University of Freiburg (colloquially ), officially the Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg (), is a public university, public research university located in Freiburg im Breisgau, Baden-Württemberg, Germany. The university was founded in 1 ...
publishes
Turtle Turtles are reptiles of the order (biology), order Testudines, characterized by a special turtle shell, shell developed mainly from their ribs. Modern turtles are divided into two major groups, the Pleurodira (side necked turtles) and Crypt ...
dumps suitable for linked data systems. From 2020 to 2024, Meta published the Daylight Map Distribution, which applied
quality assurance Quality assurance (QA) is the term used in both manufacturing and service industries to describe the systematic efforts taken to assure that the product(s) delivered to customer(s) meet with the contractual and other agreed upon performance, design ...
processes and added some external datasets to OSM data to make it more production-ready. OSM data also forms a major part of the Overture Maps Foundation's dataset and commercial datasets from Mapbox and MapTiler.


Mapmaking


Data sources

Map data is collected by ground survey, personal knowledge, digitizing from imagery, and government data. Ground survey data is collected by volunteers traditionally using tools such as a handheld GPS unit, a
notebook A notebook (also known as a notepad, writing pad, drawing pad, or legal pad) is a book or stack of paper pages that are often ruled and used for purposes such as note-taking, journaling or other writing, drawing, or scrapbooking and more. ...
,
digital camera A digital camera, also called a digicam, is a camera that captures photographs in Digital data storage, digital memory. Most cameras produced today are digital, largely replacing those that capture images on photographic film or film stock. Dig ...
and voice recorder. Software applications on
smartphone A smartphone is a mobile phone with advanced computing capabilities. It typically has a touchscreen interface, allowing users to access a wide range of applications and services, such as web browsing, email, and social media, as well as multi ...
s (mobile devices) have made it easy for anybody to survey. The data is then entered into the OpenStreetMap database using a number of
software tools A programming tool or software development tool is a computer program that is used to software development, develop another computer program, usually by helping the developer manage computer files. For example, a programmer may use a tool called ...
including JOSM an
Merkaator
Additionally, more recently apps such as
StreetComplete StreetComplete is an easy to use OpenStreetMap#Editing_software , OpenStreetMap editor that can be used without prior knowledge about OpenStreetMap. The app prompts users to answer questions like ''"What are the opening hours here?"'' or ''"Is thi ...
offer "quests" to users in nearby vicinity, allowing them to add metadata to specific points of interest (such as, for example, the opening hours of a restaurant or whether or not a particular crosswalk has tactile paving). Mapathon competition events are also held by local OpenStreetMap teams and by non-profit organisations and local governments to map a particular area. The availability of aerial photography and other data from commercial and government sources has added important sources of data for manual editing and automated imports. Special processes are in place to handle automated imports and avoid legal and technical problems.


Surveys and personal knowledge

Ground surveys are performed by a mapper, on foot,
bicycle A bicycle, also called a pedal cycle, bike, push-bike or cycle, is a human-powered transport, human-powered or motorized bicycle, motor-assisted, bicycle pedal, pedal-driven, single-track vehicle, with two bicycle wheel, wheels attached to a ...
, or in a
car A car, or an automobile, is a motor vehicle with wheels. Most definitions of cars state that they run primarily on roads, seat one to eight people, have four wheels, and mainly transport people rather than cargo. There are around one billio ...
,
motorcycle A motorcycle (motorbike, bike; uni (if one-wheeled); trike (if three-wheeled); quad (if four-wheeled)) is a lightweight private 1-to-2 passenger personal motor vehicle Steering, steered by a Motorcycle handlebar, handlebar from a saddle-style ...
, or
boat A boat is a watercraft of a large range of types and sizes, but generally smaller than a ship, which is distinguished by its larger size or capacity, its shape, or its ability to carry boats. Small boats are typically used on inland waterways s ...
. Map data is typically recorded on a GPS unit or on a smart phone with mapping app; a common file format is GPX. Once the data has been collected, it is entered into the database by uploading it onto the project's website together with appropriate attribute data. As collecting and uploading data may be separated from editing objects, contribution to the project is possible without using a GPS unit, such as by using paper mapping. Similar to users contributing data using a GPS unit, corporations (e.g. Amazon) with large vehicle fleets may use telemetry data from the vehicles to contribute data to OpenStreetMap. Some committed contributors adopt the task of mapping whole towns and cities, or organising mapping parties to gather the support of others to complete a map area. A large number of less-active users contributes corrections and small additions to the map.


Satellite/Aerial images

Maxar Maxar Technologies Inc. is an American space technology company headquartered in Westminster, Colorado, United States, specializing in geospatial intelligence, Earth observation, and on-orbit servicing satellites, satellite products, and relate ...
,
Bing Bing most often refers to: * Bing Crosby (1903–1977), American singer * Microsoft Bing, a web search engine Bing may also refer to: Food and drink * Bing (bread), a Chinese flatbread * Bing (soft drink), a UK brand * Bing cherry, a varie ...
,
ESRI Environmental Systems Research Institute, Inc., doing business as Esri (), is an American Multinational corporation, multinational geographic information system (GIS) software company headquartered in Redlands, California. It is best known for ...
, and Mapbox are some of the providers of aerial/
satellite A satellite or an artificial satellite is an object, typically a spacecraft, placed into orbit around a celestial body. They have a variety of uses, including communication relay, weather forecasting, navigation ( GPS), broadcasting, scient ...
imagery which are used as a backdrop for map production.
Yahoo! Yahoo (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web portal that provides the search engine Yahoo Search and related services including My Yahoo, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo News, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Sports, y!entertainment, yahoo!life, and its a ...
(2006–2011),
Bing Bing most often refers to: * Bing Crosby (1903–1977), American singer * Microsoft Bing, a web search engine Bing may also refer to: Food and drink * Bing (bread), a Chinese flatbread * Bing (soft drink), a UK brand * Bing cherry, a varie ...
(2010 – present), and DigitalGlobe (2017–2023) allowed their
aerial photography Aerial photography (or airborne imagery) is the taking of photographs from an aircraft or other flight, airborne platforms. When taking motion pictures, it is also known as aerial videography. Platforms for aerial photography include fixed-wi ...
, satellite imagery to be used as a backdrop for map production. For a period from 2009 to 2011, NearMap Pty Ltd made their high-resolution PhotoMaps (of major Australian cities, plus some rural Australian areas) available under a
CC BY-SA A Creative Commons (CC) license is one of several public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted "work". A CC license is used when an author wants to give other people the right to share, use, and bui ...
licence.


Street-level image data

Data from several street-level image platforms are available as map data photo overlays. Bing Streetside 360° image tracks, and the open and crowdsourced Mapillary and KartaView platforms provide generally smartphone and dashcam images. Additionally, a Mapillary
traffic sign Traffic signs or road signs are signs erected at the side of or above roads to give instructions or provide information to road users. The earliest signs were simple wooden or stone milestones. Later, signs with directional arms were introduc ...
data layer, a product of user-submitted images is also available.


Government data

Some government agencies have released official data on appropriate licences. This includes the United States, where works of the
federal government A federation (also called a federal state) is an entity characterized by a political union, union of partially federated state, self-governing provinces, states, or other regions under a #Federal governments, federal government (federalism) ...
are placed under
public domain The public domain (PD) consists of all the creative work to which no Exclusive exclusive intellectual property rights apply. Those rights may have expired, been forfeited, expressly Waiver, waived, or may be inapplicable. Because no one holds ...
. In the United States, most roads originate from
TIGER The tiger (''Panthera tigris'') is a large Felidae, cat and a member of the genus ''Panthera'' native to Asia. It has a powerful, muscular body with a large head and paws, a long tail and orange fur with black, mostly vertical stripes. It is ...
from the Census Bureau. Geographic names were initially sourced from
Geographic Names Information System The Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) is a database of name and location information about more than two million physical and cultural features, encompassing the United States and its territories; the Compact of Free Association, asso ...
, and some areas contain water features from the National Hydrography Dataset. In the UK, some
Ordnance Survey The Ordnance Survey (OS) is the national mapping agency for Great Britain. The agency's name indicates its original military purpose (see Artillery, ordnance and surveying), which was to map Scotland in the wake of the Jacobite rising of ...
OpenData is imported. In Canada
Natural Resources Canada Natural Resources Canada (NRCan; ; )Natural Resources Canada is the applied title under the Federal Identity Program; the legal title is Department of Natural Resources (). is the department of the Government of Canada responsible for natural r ...
's CanVec vector data and GeoBase provide landcover and streets. Globally, OpenStreetMap initially used the prototype global shoreline from
NOAA The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA ) is an American scientific and regulatory agency charged with forecasting weather, monitoring oceanic and atmospheric conditions, charting the seas, conducting deep-sea exploratio ...
. Due to it being oversimplified and crude, it has been mainly replaced by other government sources or manual tracing. Out-of-copyright maps can be good sources of information about features that do not change frequently. Copyright periods vary, but in the UK
Crown copyright Crown copyright is a type of copyright protection. It subsists in works of the governments of some Commonwealth realms and provides special copyright rules for the Crown, i.e. government departments and (generally) state entities.Judge, E. F. (201 ...
expires after 50 years and hence old Ordnance Survey maps can legally be used. A complete set of UK 1 inch/mile maps from the late 1940s and early 1950s has been collected, scanned, and is available online as a resource for contributors.


Editing software

The map data can be edited from a number of editing applications that provide aids including satellite and aerial imagery, street-level imagery, GPS traces, and photo and voice annotations. By default, the official OSM website directs contributors to the Web-based iD editor. Meta develops a fork of this editor, Rapid, that provides access to external datasets, including some derived from
machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of study in artificial intelligence concerned with the development and study of Computational statistics, statistical algorithms that can learn from data and generalise to unseen data, and thus perform Task ( ...
detections. For complex or large-scale changes, experienced users often turn to more powerful desktop editing applications such as JOSM and Potlatch. Several mobile applications also edit OSM. Go Map!! and Vespucci are the primary full-featured editors for iOS and Android, respectively.
StreetComplete StreetComplete is an easy to use OpenStreetMap#Editing_software , OpenStreetMap editor that can be used without prior knowledge about OpenStreetMap. The app prompts users to answer questions like ''"What are the opening hours here?"'' or ''"Is thi ...
is an Android application designed for laypeople around a guided question-and-answer format. CoMaps, Every Door, Maps.me, Organic Maps, and OsmAnd include basic functionality for editing points of interest. Between 2018 and 2023, the top five editing tools by number of edits were JOSM, iD, StreetComplete, Rapid, and Potlatch.


Quality assurance

OSM accepts contributions from the general public. Changesets submitted through editors and the OSM API immediately enter the database and are quickly published for reuse, without going through peer review beforehand. The API only validates changes for basic well-formedness, but not for topological or logical consistency or for adherence to community norms. As a crowdsourced project, OSM is susceptible to several forms of data
vandalism Vandalism is the action involving deliberate destruction of or damage to public or private property. The term includes property damage, such as graffiti and defacement directed towards any property without permission of the owner. The t ...
, including copyright infringement, graffiti, and spam. Overall, vandalism accounts for an estimated 0.2% of edits to OSM, which is relatively low compared to
vandalism on Wikipedia On Wikipedia, vandalism is editing the project in an intentionally disruptive or malicious manner. Vandalism includes any addition, removal, or modification that is intentionally Humour, humorous, Nonsense, nonsensical, a Reliability of Wiki ...
. Members of the community detect and fix most unintentional errors and vandalism promptly, by monitoring the slippy map and
revision history A changelog (also spelled change log) is a log or record of all notable changes made to a project. The project is often a website or software project, and the changelog usually includes records of changes such as bug fixes, new features, etc. Som ...
on the main website, as well as by searching for issues using tools like OSMCha, OSM Inspector, and Osmose. In addition to community vigilance, the OpenStreetMap Foundation's Data Working Group and a group of administrators are responsible for responding to vandals. , a comprehensive security assessment of the OSM data model has yet to take place. There have been several high-profile incidents of vandalism and other errors in OSM: * In 2012, contractors affiliated with
Google Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...
were found to be sabotaging OSM's navigation data in major cities around the world. Google responded by dismissing the contractors. * In 2018, a vandal renamed
New York City New York, often called New York City (NYC), is the most populous city in the United States, located at the southern tip of New York State on one of the world's largest natural harbors. The city comprises five boroughs, each coextensive w ...
and some nearby map features to antisemitic names. Although the vandalism was quickly expunged, third-party replication lag caused it to resurface to readers of
Wikipedia Wikipedia is a free content, free Online content, online encyclopedia that is written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and the wiki software MediaWiki. Founded by Jimmy Wales and La ...
, as well as to users of Mapbox-powered applications such as Zillow, Snapchat, and Citibike. * In 2020, '' Microsoft Flight Simulator'' players discovered an impossibly thin, 212-story building in a
Melbourne Melbourne ( , ; Boonwurrung language, Boonwurrung/ or ) is the List of Australian capital cities, capital and List of cities in Australia by population, most populous city of the States and territories of Australia, Australian state of Victori ...
suburb, which was traced to a
typographical error A typographical error (often shortened to typo), also called a misprint, is a mistake (such as a spelling or transposition error) made in the typing of printed or electronic material. Historically, this referred to mistakes in manual typesettin ...
that had gone unnoticed in OSM for a year. * In 2021, Balad, an Iranian developer of OSM-based mobile navigation applications, apologized after the OSM community caught an employee vandalising streets in Iran. * In 2023, the
Taj Mahal The Taj Mahal ( ; ; ) is an ivory-white marble mausoleum on the right bank of the river Yamuna in Agra, Uttar Pradesh, India. It was commissioned in 1631 by the fifth Mughal Empire, Mughal emperor, Shah Jahan () to house the tomb of his belo ...
was misidentified as "Shiva Kshetra (Shiv Mandir)" (a
Hindu temple A Hindu temple, also known as Mandir, Devasthanam, Pura, or Kovil, is a sacred place where Hindus worship and show their devotion to Hindu deities, deities through worship, sacrifice, and prayers. It is considered the house of the god to who ...
dedicated to
Shiva Shiva (; , ), also known as Mahadeva (; , , Help:IPA/Sanskrit, ɐɦaːd̪eːʋɐh and Hara, is one of the Hindu deities, principal deities of Hinduism. He is the God in Hinduism, Supreme Being in Shaivism, one of the major traditions w ...
) for 13 days until contributors from Kerala discovered and fixed it. Players of '' Pokémon Go'' have been known to vandalize OSM, one of the game's map data sources, to manipulate gameplay. However, this vandalism is casual, rarely sustained, and it is predictable based on the mechanics of the game.


Community

The project has a geographically diverse user-base, due to emphasis of local knowledge and "on-the-ground" situation in the process of data collection. Many early contributors were cyclists who survey with and for bicyclists, charting cycleroutes and navigable
trail A trail, also known as a path or track, is an unpaved lane or a small paved road (though it can also be a route along a navigable waterways) generally not intended for usage by motorized vehicles, usually passing through a natural area. Ho ...
s. Others are GIS professionals. Contributors are predominately men, with only 3–5% being women. By August 2008, shortly after the second The State of the Map conference was held, there were over 50,000 registered contributors; by March 2009, there were 100,000 and by the end of 2009 the figure was nearly 200,000. In April 2012, OpenStreetMap cleared 600,000 registered contributors. On 6 January 2013, OpenStreetMap reached one million registered users. Around 30% of users have contributed at least one point to the OpenStreetMap database. As per a study conducted in 2011, only 38% of members carried out at least one edit and only 5% of members created more than 1000 nodes. Most members are in Europe (72%). According to another study, when a competing maps platform is launched, OSM attracts fewer new contributors and pre-existing contributors increase their level of contribution possibly driven by their ideological attachment to the platform. Overall, there is a negative effect on the quantum of contributions.


Commercial contributors

Some companies freely license satellite/aerial/street imagery sources from which OpenStreetMap contributors trace roads and features, while other companies make data available for importing map data. Automotive Navigation Data (AND) provided a complete road data set for Netherlands and trunk roads data for China and India. Amazon Logistics uses OpenStreetMap for navigation and has a team which revises the map based on GPS traces and feedback from its drivers. In eight Southeast Asian countries, Grab has contributed more than of roads based on drivers' GPS traces, including many narrow alleyways that are missing from other mapping platforms. eCourier also contributes its drivers' GPS traces to OSM. According to a study, about 17% of road kilometers were last touched by corporate teams in March 2020. The top 13 corporate contributors during 2014–2020 include Apple, Kaart, Amazon, Facebook, Mapbox, Digital Egypt, Grab, Microsoft, Telenav, Developmentseed, Uber, Lightcyphers and Lyft. According to OpenStreetMap Statistics, the over all percentage of edits from corporations peaked at about 10% in 2020 and 2021 and has since fallen to about 2-3% in 2024.


Non-governmental organisations

Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) is a nonprofit organisation promoting community mapping across the world. It developed the open source HOT Tasking Manager for collaboration, and contributed to mapping efforts after the April 2015 Nepal earthquake, the 2016 Kumamoto earthquakes, and the 2016 Ecuador earthquake. The Missing Maps Project, founded by the American Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders, and other NGOs, uses HOT Tasking Manager. The
University of Heidelberg Heidelberg University, officially the Ruprecht Karl University of Heidelberg (; ), is a public university, public research university in Heidelberg, Baden-Württemberg, Germany. Founded in 1386 on instruction of Pope Urban VI, Heidelberg is List ...
hosts the Disastermappers Project for training university students in mapping for humanitarian purposes. When Ebola broke out in 2014, the volunteers mapped 100,000 buildings and hundreds of miles of roads in Guinea in just five days. Local groups such as Ramani Huria in
Dar es Salaam Dar es Salaam (, ; from ) is the largest city and financial hub of Tanzania. It is also the capital of the Dar es Salaam Region. With a population of over 7 million people, Dar es Salaam is the largest city in East Africa by population and the ...
incorporate OSM mapping into their community resilience programmes. Community emergency response teams in
San Francisco San Francisco, officially the City and County of San Francisco, is a commercial, Financial District, San Francisco, financial, and Culture of San Francisco, cultural center of Northern California. With a population of 827,526 residents as of ...
and elsewhere organize field surveys and mapathons to contribute information about fire alarm call boxes,
hazard symbol Hazard symbols are universally recognized Symbol, symbols designed to alert individuals to the presence of Hazard, hazardous or dangerous materials, locations, or conditions. These include risks associated with Electromagnetic field, electromag ...
s, and other relevant features.


Conferences

Since 2007, the OpenStreetMap community has organised State of the Map (SotM), an annual international conference at which stakeholders present on technical progress and discuss policy issues. The conference is held each year in a different city around the world. Various regional editions of State of the Map are also held for each continent, regions such as the Baltics and Latin America, and some countries with especially active local communities, such as France, Germany, and the United States.


Operation

The official OSM website at openstreetmap.org is the project's main hub for contributors. A reference implementation of a slippy map (featuring a selection of third-party tile layers), a revision log, and integrations with basic geocoders and route planners facilitate the community's management of the database contents. Logged-in users can access an embedded copy of the iD editor and shortcuts for desktop editors for contributing to the database, as well as some rudimentary
social networking A social network is a social structure consisting of a set of social actors (such as individuals or organizations), networks of Dyad (sociology), dyadic ties, and other Social relation, social interactions between actors. The social network per ...
features such as user profiles and diaries. The website's built-in
REST REST (Representational State Transfer) is a software architectural style that was created to describe the design and guide the development of the architecture for the World Wide Web. REST defines a set of constraints for how the architecture of ...
API and OAuth authentication enable third-party applications to programmatically interact with the site's major functionality, including submitting changes. Much of the website runs as a Ruby on Rails application backed by a
PostgreSQL PostgreSQL ( ) also known as Postgres, is a free and open-source software, free and open-source relational database management system (RDBMS) emphasizing extensibility and SQL compliance. PostgreSQL features transaction processing, transactions ...
database.


Software development

Strictly speaking, the OSM project produces only a geographic database, leaving data consumers to handle every aspect of postprocessing the data and presenting it to end users. However, a large ecosystem of command line tools, software libraries, and cloud services has developed around OSM, much of it as
free and open-source software Free and open-source software (FOSS) is software available under a license that grants users the right to use, modify, and distribute the software modified or not to everyone free of charge. FOSS is an inclusive umbrella term encompassing free ...
. Two kinds of software stacks have emerged for rendering OSM data as an interactive slippy map. In one, a server-side rendering engine such as Mapnik prerenders the data as a series of
raster image upright=1, The Smiley, smiley face in the top left corner is a raster image. When enlarged, individual pixels appear as squares. Enlarging further, each pixel can be analyzed, with their colors constructed through combination of the values for ...
tiles, then serves them using a library such as ''mod_tile''. A library such as OpenLayers or Leaflet displays these tiles on the client side on the slippy map. Alternatively, a server application converts raw OSM data into vector tiles according to a schema, such as Mapbox Streets, OpenMapTiles, or Shortbread. These tiles are rendered on the client side by a library such as the Mapbox Maps SDK, MapLibre, Mapzen's Tangrams, or OpenLayers. Applications such as Mapbox Studio allow designers to author vector styles in an interactive, visual environment. Vector maps are especially common among three-dimensional mapping applications and mobile applications. Plugins are available for embedding slippy maps in
content management system A content management system (CMS) is computer software used to manage the creation and modification of digital content ( content management).''Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy''. Ann Rockley, Pamela Kostur, Steve Manning. New ...
s such as
WordPress WordPress (WP, or WordPress.org) is a web content management system. It was originally created as a tool to publish blogs but has evolved to support publishing other web content, including more traditional websites, electronic mailing list, ma ...
. A geocoder indexes map data so that users can search it by name and address (
geocoding Address geocoding, or simply geocoding, is the process of taking a text-based description of a location, such as an address or the name of a place, and returning geographic coordinates, frequently latitude/longitude pair, to identify a locati ...
) or look up an address based on a given coordinate pair (
reverse geocoding Reverse geocoding is the process of converting a location as described by geographic coordinates (latitude, longitude) to a human-readable address or place name. It is the opposite of forward geocoding (often referred to as address geocoding or ...
). Several geocoders are designed to index OSM data, including Nominatim (from the Latin, 'by name'), which is built into the official OSM website along with
GeoNames GeoNames (or GeoNames.org) is a user-editable geographical database available and accessible through various web services, under a Creative Commons attribution license. The project was founded in late 2005. The GeoNames dataset differs from, b ...
. Komoot's Photon
search engine A search engine is a software system that provides hyperlinks to web pages, and other relevant information on World Wide Web, the Web in response to a user's web query, query. The user enters a query in a web browser or a mobile app, and the sea ...
provides incremental search functionality based on a Nominatim database. The nonprofit Social Web Foundation's places.pub formats OSM locations as ActivityPub objects, enabling social media applications to enrich geocodes associated with
check-in Check-in is the process whereby people announce their arrival at an office, hotel, airport, hospital, port, seaport or event. Office check-in Many offices have a reception or front office area near the entrance to greet or assist visitors arriv ...
s. Element 84's
natural language A natural language or ordinary language is a language that occurs naturally in a human community by a process of use, repetition, and change. It can take different forms, typically either a spoken language or a sign language. Natural languages ...
geocoder uses a large language model to identify OSM geometries to return. A variety of route planning libraries and services are based on OSM data. OSM's official website has featured GraphHopper, the Open Source Routing Machine, and Valhalla since February 2015. Other widely deployed routing engines include Openrouteservice and OpenTripPlanner, which specializes in public transport routing.


Uses

OSM is an important source of geographic data in many fields, including transportation, analysis, public services, and humanitarian aid. However, much of its use by consumers is indirect via third-party products, because customer reviews and aerial and
satellite imagery Satellite images (also Earth observation imagery, spaceborne photography, or simply satellite photo) are images of Earth collected by imaging satellites operated by governments and businesses around the world. Satellite imaging companies sell im ...
are not part of the project per se.


Cartography

A variety of applications and services allow users to visualise OSM data in the form of a map. The official OSM website features an interactive slippy map interface so that users can efficiently edit maps and view changesets. It presents the general-purpose ''OpenStreetMap Carto'' style alongside a selection of specialised styles for cycling and public transport. Beyond this reference implementation, community-maintained map applications focus on alternative cartographic representations and specialised use cases. For example, OpenRailwayMap is a detailed online map of the world's railway infrastructure based on OSM data. OpenSeaMap is a world
nautical chart A nautical chart or hydrographic chart is a graphic representation of a sea region or water body and adjacent coasts or river bank, banks. Depending on the scale (map), scale of the chart, it may show depths of water (bathymetry) and heights of ...
built as a mashup of OpenStreetMap, crowdsourced water depth tracks, and third-party weather and bathymetric data. OpenTopoMap uses OSM and
SRTM The Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) is an international research effort that obtained digital elevation models on a near-global scale from 56th parallel south, 56°S to 60th parallel north, 60°N, to generate the most complete high-resol ...
data to create
topographic map In modern mapping, a topographic map or topographic sheet is a type of map characterized by large- scale detail and quantitative representation of relief features, usually using contour lines (connecting points of equal elevation), but histori ...
s. Tactile Map Automated Production prints tactile maps that feature embossed streets, paths, and railroads from OSM. On the desktop, applications such as GNOME Maps and
Marble Marble is a metamorphic rock consisting of carbonate minerals (most commonly calcite (CaCO3) or Dolomite (mineral), dolomite (CaMg(CO3)2) that have recrystallized under the influence of heat and pressure. It has a crystalline texture, and is ty ...
provide their own interactive styles. GIS suites such as
QGIS QGIS is a geographic information system (GIS) software that is free and open-source. QGIS supports Windows, macOS, and Linux. It supports viewing, editing, printing, and analysis of geospatial data in a range of data formats. Its name comes from ...
allow users to produce their own custom maps based on the same data.


Geolocation

Many commercial and noncommercial websites feature maps powered by OSM data in
locator map In cartography, a locator map, or just a ''locator'', is typically a simple map used to show the location of a particular geographic region within its larger and presumably more familiar context. Depending on the needs of the cartographer, this ty ...
s, store locators, infographics, story maps, and other mashups. Locator maps on
Wikipedia Wikipedia is a free content, free Online content, online encyclopedia that is written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and the wiki software MediaWiki. Founded by Jimmy Wales and La ...
and
Wikivoyage Wikivoyage is a free web-based travel guide for travel destinations and travel topics written by volunteer authors. It is a sister project of Wikipedia and supported and hosted by the same non-profit Wikimedia Foundation (WMF). Wikivoyage has ...
articles for cities and points of interest are powered by a
MediaWiki MediaWiki is free and open-source wiki software originally developed by Magnus Manske for use on Wikipedia on January 25, 2002, and further improved by Lee Daniel Crocker,mailarchive:wikipedia-l/2001-August/000382.html, Magnus Manske's announc ...
extension and the OSM-based Wikimedia Maps service. The locator maps on Craigslist,
Facebook Facebook is a social media and social networking service owned by the American technology conglomerate Meta Platforms, Meta. Created in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with four other Harvard College students and roommates, Eduardo Saverin, Andre ...
,
Flickr Flickr ( ) is an image hosting service, image and Online video platform, video hosting service, as well as an online community, founded in Canada and headquartered in the United States. It was created by Ludicorp in 2004 and was previously a co ...
,
Foursquare City Guide Foursquare City Guide, commonly known as Foursquare, is a local search-and-discovery mobile app developed by Foursquare (company), Foursquare Labs Inc. The app provides personalized recommendations of places near a user's current location based ...
, Gurtam's Wialon, and Snapchat are also powered by OSM. From 2013 to 2022,
GitHub GitHub () is a Proprietary software, proprietary developer platform that allows developers to create, store, manage, and share their code. It uses Git to provide distributed version control and GitHub itself provides access control, bug trackin ...
visualized any uploaded GeoJSON data atop an OSM-based Mapbox basemap. In 2012,
Apple An apple is a round, edible fruit produced by an apple tree (''Malus'' spp.). Fruit trees of the orchard or domestic apple (''Malus domestica''), the most widely grown in the genus, are agriculture, cultivated worldwide. The tree originated ...
quietly switched the locator map in
iPhoto iPhoto is a discontinued image editing software application developed by Apple Inc. for use on its Mac OS X operating system. It was included with every Mac computer from 2002 to 2015, when it was replaced with Apple's Photos application in ...
from
Google Maps Google Maps is a web mapping platform and consumer application offered by Google. It offers satellite imagery, aerial photography, street maps, 360° interactive panorama, interactive panoramic views of streets (Google Street View, Street View ...
to OSM. Interactive OSM-based maps appear in many mobile navigation applications, fitness applications, and augmented reality games, such as
Strava Strava is an American internet service for tracking physical exercise which incorporates social network features. It started out tracking mostly outdoor cycling and running activities using Global Positioning System (GPS) data, but now incorpor ...
.


Geospatial analysis

The Overpass API searches the OSM database for features whose metadata or topology match criteria specified in a structured
query language A query language, also known as data query language or database query language (DQL), is a computer language used to make queries in databases and information systems. In database systems, query languages rely on strict theory to retrieve informa ...
. Overpass turbo is an
integrated development environment An integrated development environment (IDE) is a Application software, software application that provides comprehensive facilities for software development. An IDE normally consists of at least a source-code editor, build automation tools, an ...
for querying this API. Bellingcat develops an alternative Overpass frontend for geolocating photographs. QLever and Sophox are
triplestore A triplestore or RDF store is a purpose-built database for the storage and retrieval of triples through semantic queries. A triple is a data entity composed of subject– predicate– object, like "Bob is 35" (i.e., Bob's age measured in years i ...
s that accept standard SPARQL queries to return facts about the OSM database. Geographic information retrieval systems such as NLMaps Web and OSCAR answer natural language queries based on OSM data. OSMnx is a Python package for analysing and visualising the OSM
road network A street network is a system of interconnecting lines and points (called ''edges'' and ''nodes'' in network science) that represent a system of streets or roads for a given area. A street network provides the foundation for network analysis; for e ...
. OSM is often a source for realistic, large-scale transport network analyses because the raw road network data is freely available or because of aspects of coverage that are uncommon in proprietary alternatives. OSM data can be imported into professional-grade traffic simulation frameworks such as Aimsun Next, Eclipse SUMO, and MATSim, as well as
urban planning Urban planning (also called city planning in some contexts) is the process of developing and designing land use and the built environment, including air, water, and the infrastructure passing into and out of urban areas, such as transportatio ...
–focused simulators such as A/B Street. A team at the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute has used Valhalla's map matching function to evaluate advanced driver-assistance systems. The
United States Census Bureau The United States Census Bureau, officially the Bureau of the Census, is a principal agency of the Federal statistical system, U.S. federal statistical system, responsible for producing data about the American people and American economy, econ ...
has analysed routes generated by the Open Source Routing Machine along with
American Community Survey The American Community Survey (ACS) is an annual demographics survey program conducted by the United States Census Bureau. It regularly gathers information previously contained only in the long form of the United States census, decennial census ...
data to develop a socioeconomic profile of commuters affected by the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse. OSM is also used in conservation and
land-use planning Land use planning or ''Land-use regulation'' is the process of regulating the use of land by a central authority. Usually, this is done to promote more desirable social and environmental outcomes as well as a more efficient use of resources. ...
research. The annual Forest Landscape Integrity Index is based on a comprehensive map of remaining roadless areas derived from OSM's road network. Computer vision researchers have trained
convolutional neural network A convolutional neural network (CNN) is a type of feedforward neural network that learns features via filter (or kernel) optimization. This type of deep learning network has been applied to process and make predictions from many different ty ...
s on OSM's
land use Land use is an umbrella term to describe what happens on a parcel of land. It concerns the benefits derived from using the land, and also the land management actions that humans carry out there. The following categories are used for land use: fo ...
areas to perform feature detection and image segmentation on
Sentinel-2 Sentinel-2 is an Earth observation mission from the Copernicus Programme that acquires optical imagery at high spatial resolution (10 m to 60 m) over land and coastal waters. The mission's Sentinel-2A and Sentinel-2B satellites were joined in or ...
satellite imagery, both globally (OpenSentinelMap) and in Europe (OSMlanduse). Some newsrooms routinely incorporate OSM data into their workflows and
data journalism Data journalism or data-driven journalism (DDJ) is journalism based on the filtering and analysis of large data sets for the purpose of creating or elevating a news story. Data journalism reflects the increased role of numerical data in the p ...
projects. The ''
Chicago Tribune The ''Chicago Tribune'' is an American daily newspaper based in Chicago, Illinois, United States. Founded in 1847, it was formerly self-styled as the "World's Greatest Newspaper", a slogan from which its once integrated WGN (AM), WGN radio and ...
'' maintains a dashboard of crime in Chicago visualized against an OSM basemap. ''
The Washington Post ''The Washington Post'', locally known as ''The'' ''Post'' and, informally, ''WaPo'' or ''WP'', is an American daily newspaper published in Washington, D.C., the national capital. It is the most widely circulated newspaper in the Washington m ...
'' and ''
Los Angeles Times The ''Los Angeles Times'' is an American Newspaper#Daily, daily newspaper that began publishing in Los Angeles, California, in 1881. Based in the Greater Los Angeles city of El Segundo, California, El Segundo since 2018, it is the List of new ...
'' accompany articles with locator maps and more in-depth visuals that rely on OSM's hyperlocal coverage of places that have less detail in proprietary maps. Various groups, including researchers, data journalists, the Open Knowledge Foundation, and Geochicas, have used OSM in conjunction with Wikidata to explore the demographics of people honoured by street names and raise awareness of gender bias in naming decisions.


Navigation

OSM is a data source for some Web-based map services. In 2010, Bing Maps introduced an option to display an OSM-based map and later began including building data from OSM by default. Wheelmap.org is a portal for discovering wheelchair-accessible places, mashing up OSM data with a separate, crowdsourced customer review database. Mobile applications such as CoMaps, CycleStreets, Karta GPS, Komoot, Locus Map, Maps.me, Organic Maps, and OsmAnd also provide offline route planning capabilities. Apple Maps uses OSM data in many countries. Some of
Garmin Garmin Ltd. is an American multinational technology company based in Olathe, Kansas. The company designs, develops, manufactures, markets, and distributes GPS-enabled products and other navigation, communication, sensor-based, and information ...
's GPS products incorporate OSM data. OSM is a popular source for road data among Iranian navigation applications, such as Balad. Geotab and TeleNav also use OSM data in their in-car navigation systems. Some public transportation providers rely on OpenStreetMap data in their route planning services and for other analysis needs. OSM data appears in the driver or rider application or powers backend operations for ridesharing companies and related services. In 2022, Grab completed a migration from Google Maps and Here Maps to an in-house, OSM-based navigation solution, reducing trip times by about 90 seconds. In 2024, Ola introduced a mapping platform partly based on OSM data. In 2019, owners of Tesla cars found that the Smart Summon automatic valet parking feature within Tesla Autopilot relied on OSM's coverage of parking lot details. Webots uses OSM data to simulate realistic surroundings for autonomous vehicles.


Humanitarian aid

Humanitarian aid agencies use OSM data both proactively and reactively. OSM's road and building coverage allow them to discover patterns of disease outbreaks and target interventions such as
antimalarial medication Antimalarial medications or simply antimalarials are a type of antiparasitic chemical agent, often natural product, naturally derived, that can be used to treat or to prevent malaria, in the latter case, most often aiming at two susceptible target ...
s toward remote villages. After a disaster occurs, they produce large-format printed maps and downloadable maps for GPS tracking units for aid workers to use in the field. The
2010 Haiti earthquake The 2010 Haiti earthquake was a catastrophic Moment magnitude scale, magnitude 7.0 Mw earthquake that struck Haiti at 16:53 local time (21:53 UTC) on Tuesday, 12 January 2010. The epicenter was near the town of Léogâne, Ouest (departm ...
established a model for non-governmental organisations (NGOs) to collaborate with international organisations. OpenStreetMap and Crisis Commons volunteers used available satellite imagery to map the roads, buildings and refugee camps of
Port-au-Prince Port-au-Prince ( ; ; , ) is the Capital city, capital and List of cities in Haiti, most populous city of Haiti. The city's population was estimated at 1,200,000 in 2022 with the metropolitan area estimated at a population of 2,618,894. The me ...
in just two days, building "the most complete digital map of Haiti's roads". The resulting data and maps have been used by several organisations providing relief aid, such as the
World Bank The World Bank is an international financial institution that provides loans and Grant (money), grants to the governments of Least developed countries, low- and Developing country, middle-income countries for the purposes of economic development ...
, the European Commission Joint Research Centre, the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, UNOSAT and others. After Haiti, the OpenStreetMap community continued mapping to support humanitarian organisations for various crises and disasters. After the Northern Mali conflict (January 2013), Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines (November 2013), and the
Ebola virus epidemic in West Africa The 2013–2016 epidemic of Ebola virus disease, centered in West Africa, was the most widespread outbreak of the disease in history. It caused major loss of life and socioeconomic disruption in the region, mainly in Guinea, Liberia and S ...
(March 2014), the OpenStreetMap community in association with the NGO Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) has shown it can play a significant role in supporting humanitarian organisations.


Gaming

OSM is a map data source for many location-based games that require broad coverage of local details such as streets and buildings. One of the earliest such games was
Hasbro Hasbro, Inc. (; a syllabic abbreviation of its original name, Hassenfeld Brothers) is an American multinational corporation, multinational toy manufacturing and entertainment holding company founded on December 6, 1923 by Henry, Hillel and Herma ...
's short-lived '' Monopoly City Streets'' (2009), which offered a choice between OSM and
Google Maps Google Maps is a web mapping platform and consumer application offered by Google. It offers satellite imagery, aerial photography, street maps, 360° interactive panorama, interactive panoramic views of streets (Google Street View, Street View ...
as the playing board. '' Battlefield 4'' (2013) used a customized OSM-based Mapbox map in its leaderboards. In 2013, Ballardia shut down testing of '' World of the Living Dead: Resurrection'', because too many players attempted to use the Google Maps–based game, then relaunched it after switching to OSM, which could handle thousands of players. Flight simulators combine OSM's coverage of roads and structures with other sources of natural environment data, acting as sophisticated 3D map renderers, in order to add realism to the ground below. '' X-Plane 10'' (2011) replaced
TIGER The tiger (''Panthera tigris'') is a large Felidae, cat and a member of the genus ''Panthera'' native to Asia. It has a powerful, muscular body with a large head and paws, a long tail and orange fur with black, mostly vertical stripes. It is ...
and VMAP0 with OSM for roads, railways, and some bodies of water. '' Microsoft Flight Simulator'' (2020) introduced software-generated building models based in part on OSM data. In 2020, '' FlightGear Flight Simulator'' officially integrated OSM buildings and roads into the official scenery. City-building games and business simulation games use a subset of OSM data as a base layer to take advantage of the player's familiarity with their surroundings. In '' NIMBY Rails'' (2021), the player develops a railway network that coexists with real-world roads and bodies of water. In Jutsu Games' '' Infection Free Zone'' (2024), the player builds fortifications amid a post-apocalyptic world based on OSM streets and buildings. Other titles include ''City Bus Manager'', ''Global Farmer'', and ''Logistical: Earth''. These games incorporate realistic elements but take some liberties to enhance gameplay and mitigate gaps in OSM's coverage. Alternate reality games rely on OSM data to determine where rewards and other elements of the game spawn in the player's presence, such as the 'portals' in '' Ingress'', the 'PokéStops' and 'Pokémon Gyms' in '' Pokémon Go'', and the 'tappables' in '' Minecraft Earth'' (2019). In 2017, when Niantic migrated its augmented reality titles, including ''Ingress'' and ''Pokémon Go'', from Google Maps to OSM, the overworld maps in these games initially became more detailed for some players but completely blank for others, due to OSM's uneven geographic coverage at the time. In the first six weeks after launching in South Korea, ''Pokémon Go'' produced a seventeenfold spike in daily OSM contributions within the country. In 2024, Niantic migrated its titles to Overture Maps data, which incorporates some OSM data.


Recognition

OSM and projects based on it have been recognized for their contributions to design and the public good: * In 2014, Free Software Foundation Europe awarded the OpenStreetMap Foundation its Document Freedom Day UK Award. * In 2014, the Japan Institute of Design Promotion awarded OSM its Good Design Award. * In 2018, the Swiss Society of Cartography awarded the OSM-based OpenMapTiles project its Prix Carto award for digital cartography. * In 2019, the
Free Software Foundation The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization founded by Richard Stallman on October 4, 1985. The organisation supports the free software movement, with the organization's preference for software being distributed ...
awarded OSM the 2018 '' Free Software Award for Projects of Social Benefit''. * In 2021, Stamen Design's OSM-based tile layer ''Watercolor'' (2010) became the first live website to enter the permanent collection of the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. * In 2023, the Digital Public Goods Alliance, a United Nations–endorsed initiative, recognized OSM as a digital public good for its contribution toward the UN's
Sustainable Development Goals The ''2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development'', adopted by all United Nations (UN) members in 2015, created 17 world Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The aim of these global goals is "peace and prosperity for people and the planet" – wh ...
.


Influence

According to the Open Data Institute, OSM is one of the most successful collaboratively maintained open datasets in existence. A 2020 research report by Accenture estimated the total replacement value of the OSM database, the value of OSM software development effort, and maintenance overhead at $, roughly equivalent to the value of the
Linux kernel The Linux kernel is a Free and open-source software, free and open source Unix-like kernel (operating system), kernel that is used in many computer systems worldwide. The kernel was created by Linus Torvalds in 1991 and was soon adopted as the k ...
in 2008. Several startups have turned OSM-based
software as a service Software as a service (SaaS ) is a cloud computing service model where the provider offers use of application software to a client and manages all needed physical and software resources. SaaS is usually accessed via a web application. Unlike o ...
into a business model, including Carto, Mapbox, MapTiler, and Mapzen. The Overture Maps Foundation incorporates OSM data in some of its GIS layers. Several open collaborative mapping projects are modeled after OSM and rely on OSM software. OpenHistoricalMap is a world historical map that tracks the evolution of
human geography Human geography or anthropogeography is the branch of geography which studies spatial relationships between human communities, cultures, economies, and their interactions with the environment, examples of which include urban sprawl and urban ...
over time, from prehistory to the present day. OpenGeofiction focuses on fantasy cartography and
worldbuilding Worldbuilding is the process of constructing an imaginary world or setting (narrative), setting, sometimes associated with a fictional universe. Developing the world with coherent qualities such as a history, geography, culture and ecology is a k ...
. The OSM community sees these projects as complements for aspects of geography that are out of scope for OSM.


See also

* * * * *


References


Bibliography


Further reading

* * * *


External links


OpenStreetMap about

OpenStreetMap Wiki
* {{Authority control