State of the Map 2026

191 pointsposted 4 days ago
by lode
(2026.stateofthemap.org)

64 Comments

fitblipper

4 days ago

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.

nelblu

4 days ago

THIS. My comment is somewhat tangential but I thought still relevant. I used to work for huge financial investment company with over a trillion dollars of assets for over 10 years. I never thought I was making positive difference in people's lives. However, my job offered me so many opportunities to volunteer and I would jump on every single one of those, and that made working there totally worthwhile. I still work for another huge company these days, which offers similar opportunities to make a difference in the community and that is what keeps me going here too.

There is something to be said about building tools out of kindness and not for greed. Thank you for your contributions to OSM and Thank you OSM developers too - big fan and user!

W3zzy

4 days ago

True, I use mapcomplete or streetcomplete to kill time when traveling. I use public transport a lot. I've racked up thousands of minor edits, addi g opening hours, accesability info and what not to the map. It's been very satifactory.

I work in public service and I've grotten so many people on board that the map in my region is pretty darned good.

gonzalohm

4 days ago

I want to start contributing. I want to add some hiking trails that are not mapped around where I live. However, the process seems a bit complicated. Is there any documentation you can provide for how to contribute to OSM?

user00005

4 days ago

The iD editor built into the openstreetmap.org site is really easy to use. Sign up. Navigate to where your trails are. At the top left of the page, hit 'Edit'. At the top of the map area, select the Add Feature > 'Line'. Left click on the map to start drawing your line. Press escape on your keyboard to quit drawing. You will be prompted to select a feature type, which you'll probably want a Path or Foot Path (click the 'i' icon next to the feature for more information from the wiki which is very helpful).

Keep in mind no changes are made until you commit them using the 'Save' button at the top right of the map area. You also have 'Undo' available. You can also make changes to your line before saving. Right clicking the line or one of the nodes on the line will give additional options (such as being able to continue drawing your line).

Hit 'Save', add a descriptive Changeset Comment and add your source (usually aerial imagery).

If the trail is tree-covered and not visible on the map, you may have used GPS to record the track. In that case you would want to use something like the JOSM desktop editor that has more capability. It can import GPX files, etc.

richiebful1

4 days ago

You can also import gpx files to the online editor! But you do have to manually trace them to add them to OSM proper

amazingamazing

4 days ago

How is that different than Google or Bing? Don’t get me wrong OSM is great.

nobody42

4 days ago

Why you want to enable one of the biggest monopolies on the planet, that gatekeeps innovation? [0] [1]

Lets say you are building a delivery robot. You need not just situational awareness with LiDAR, but also a map for route planning. Will Google give you access for such technology if your innovation is a direct competitor?

If its not a delivery robot, but firefighter robot?

[0] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/05/google-abandons-open-s...

[1] https://wp-events-plugin.com/blog/2018/07/17/google-maps-api...

miahi

4 days ago

Correcting anything on Google Maps takes years. You report the issue (clearly visible against the aerial photo, for example a road that appears on the map but it's not actually there - and Maps insists routing you through) to the void and after 2 years you come back and it's still not corrected.

c0nsumer

4 days ago

This.

I build and maintain trails for hiking and mountain biking. We build a new trail or change a route and I can just put it in OSM and off it goes into all the other systems. And then I can pull the data back and use it to make maps for planning, signage... whatever.

Google you just give them data, in their format, without all the nice OSS tools that have developed around OSM and... Let them use it. I'm wholly uninterested in contributing to Google, most especially because the barrier to entry is so high.

amazingamazing

4 days ago

Ymmv i guess. I have made suggestions and seen changes in minutes before, as confirmed by other people. May be a function of the location.

antonvs

4 days ago

Because then you’re acting as free labor for a for-profit organization, improving their proprietary product.

hrnnnnnn

4 days ago

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.

HaloZero

4 days ago

Loooking forward to their kotlin multiplatform release

c0nsumer

4 days ago

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

netsharc

4 days ago

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

basil

4 days ago

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

tecoholic

3 days ago

Are my eyes deceiving me or is Mapbox not participating as an event sponsor? It's been a while, but wasn't mapbox's existence completely relied on OSM?

juliansimioni

4 days ago

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.

thangalin

4 days ago

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

4 days ago

Michelin being a higher tier sponsor than Esri is interesting

SaudAljuaid

4 days ago

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

Freak_NL

4 days ago

The naming policy is generally quite sensible, although individual mappers sometimes do weird things (OpenStreetMap is sort of an anarchistic collective). As long as most English speaking people around Lake Ontario and the Gulf of Mexico use those names, the `name` and `name:en` tags will reflect that. Usually the way media like quality newspapers use such a name is a good bellwether, and the normal name stays as long as it is evidently in common use.

If in the future most Americans do end up saying 'Lake America', `name` could follow that too, and Lake Ontario would end up in `alt_name`.

Or perhaps Americans from the White House to the New York Times to the school curriculum will call it Lake America, but Canadians will stick with Lake Ontario. In that case the top-level local language `name` might end up as 'Lake America/Ontario' (combining all local languages and variants) and `name:en` (English in general, so America would be a minority there) and `name:en-CA` would say Lake Ontario, and `name:en-US` would say Lake America. Time will tell. OpenStreetMap adjusts accordingly.

For the official name there is simply a different tag (`official_name`, or in this case `official_name:en-US` because the lake borders more than one country). Having that available makes it possible to search for it by that name.

numpad0

4 days ago

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...

Freak_NL

4 days ago

I have a hard time making sense of your post. What do you mean with 'Japanese OSM maps'? There is just one OpenStreetMap, which includes Japan.

On OpenStreetMap all entities which are named have at the very least the tag `name`. There is no need to specify which language that name is in, because this is geographically determined. For the whole of Japan, `name`-tags are considered to be in Japanese.

This specific bicycle parking has no other names but that one `name` tag, which is the Japanese 上野駅公園口自転車駐車場:

https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/3395310504

This is totally normal. Most named entities only have a local name. A random bicycle parking is not likely to have a name in any other language but the local one. For things which actually have an exonym (like countries and larger cities), you will find additional namespaced language tags like `name:ja` and `name:en`, but a bicycle parking in Japan usually doesn't have an English name (although you can translate the Japanese name).

As for why you are seeing Chinese, that has nothing to do with OpenStreetMap. Some other tool in your chain is doing that (mkgmap?).

numpad0

4 days ago

Yes, apparently it's a known unresolved issue with mkgmap tool. Looks like there is actually the option but not autodetected/not applicable if the entire planet is converted at once?

The nonsensical reading I posted in the parent comment was what I actually saw in a free map app that uses OSM data. That conversion tool is apparently used for few apps, and it apparently generate English pronunciations whenever "en" resources are missing and bake it into offline map tile files, but uses some Chinese transcription engine for all Kanji/Hanzi names.

---

So, I assume this can be solved two ways: someone can define polygons for national borders, at least for all countries that could experience this problem, such as Japan, China, Korea, Vietnam, etc., and use appropriate transcription engines to generate English readings, either at the OSM side or at the conversion tool side. But that's going to define borders for nations, and therefore I assume that there will be some challenges along that borders since everyone have some territorial disputes.

I don't think this has nothing to do with OpenStreetMap; OSM could have tentative autogenerated name or something for location names that could use English transliteration, as one way this problem can be solved, aside whether it's OSM community responsibility to do so; it's extremely high quality community maintained free/libre map, which is already tremendous. Or it could be done at export tool side, following perhaps more natural division of responsibilities. But regardless, as a non-critical longstanding issue, and a matter of fact, there are actually such exported map files out there with Chinese pronunciations baked in.

hk__2

4 days ago

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

VCFundedGenYer

4 days ago

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

dhx

4 days ago

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...

Doctor_Fegg

3 days ago

> No one stopped to question whether a shapefile of points of park benches could even be copyrightable in the first place.

Lots of people did, in fact, consider this.

user

4 days ago

[deleted]

Jimpulse

4 days ago

Does OpenStreetMap comply with US executive order naming?

mikeocool

4 days ago

The President of the United Stated doesn’t actually have the authority to tell anyone besides the executive branch what to name geographic places. So the order only forces official US government maps created by USGS and the like to be updated. Other maps can choose to update if they want to.

Open Street Map tends to reserve the “name” tag for what things are commonly called by the local community. It appears that for the Lake Ontario and The Gulf of Mexico they’ve added an “official_name:US” tag to capture the names in the executive orders.

gmiller123456

4 days ago

Even though he can't tell others to follow them, they often choose to do so anyway. E.g. Google Maps displays the Gulf of America.

kenmacd

4 days ago

It doesn't for me (although it does include it in parentheses after the real name), so I'm going to hope this is only an 'only in the US' change.

beardyw

4 days ago

Here in the UK it still says Ontario.

Interesting that he changed the name to that of the entire continent, so Mexicans and Venezuelans can feel part of it.

mc32

3 days ago

Close. But it's not (re)named Lake Americas. Remember, there are two continents, North America and South America. It's not one continent; however, jointly they can be called The Americas.

beardyw

2 days ago

Refering to the whole as America is a thing. Perhaps not in America (whatever that means).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americas

mc32

2 days ago

Sure, and referring to the whole of the UK as England is also a thing. It’s confusing but people are people. Or as they say in some parts of “England” it’s queer as folk.

beardyw

2 days ago

If you follow the link there are dictionary entries. It's not stupidity, it's completely reasonable. Amerigo Vespucci didn't name the USA, he named the entire continent.

"Britain" is widely used to refer to the UK, but Great Britain is the physical land mass which excludes Northern Ireland, so there is rarely confusion.

tescreal

4 days ago

Did they adopt the petty naming spat over Lake Ontario^WAmerica?

gmiller123456

4 days ago

Not yet, but I assume they will. They said they only ever show the official names designated by the country in question. Probably because a lot of countries disagree on borders as well as names and get really upset with people who get it wrong.

AdamH12113

4 days ago

Apple Maps does as well. It's sad that they're kowtowing to Trump in such a ridiculous way.

kylecazar

4 days ago

It's up to the renderer what to display. OSM tags data according to global consensus, they use Gulf of Mexico for 'name'. There is an attribute for 'official_name:en-US' that returns Gulf of America. Same approach for other disputed names/places.

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:official_name:en-US

"Few if any renderers consume official_name=* or any of its subkeys; in practice, the purpose of this key is for geocoders to find the feature when a user searches for the official name."

plasticsoprano

4 days ago

Well, when you visit it https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=7/23.765/-87.100 there's no naming of that area at all. At least when looked at from a US IP. And when you search "Gulf of America" it returns "Gulf of Mexico". So take from that what you will.

wongarsu

4 days ago

Also https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=8/43.622/-78.852 shows "Lake Ontario". But it does carry the tag "official_name:en-US": "Lake America", so search will find Lake America and a mapping app could decide to show the official name

Though generally official names are the names nobody uses. For example the country labeled "France" also has the attribute "official_name:en": "French Republic"

hansvm

4 days ago

Fiat never works for linguistic shifts. That order is about as likely to work as telling a kid to stop saying "six seven."

alex1138

4 days ago

I'm in favor of legislation to stop the '67' craze

recursive

4 days ago

One of its purposes is to annoy serious adults. If legislation is created, I would estimate it would extend its life somewhere between 3 weeks and infinity.

dspillett

4 days ago

Just tell them they've lost the game.

If they ask what the rules of the game are, they've just lost again.

They didn't invent being deliberately obtuse.

phainopepla2

4 days ago

Damn it, now I've lost the game

dspillett

2 days ago

Heck, if we really want to kill them with confusion, ask them the way to Mornington Crescent!

zikduruqe

4 days ago

It's community driven, so I highly doubt the public will change it.

Now, I'd love for each geographical region to take their very worst area, and rename it after a certain politician for the lulz.

scrollop

4 days ago

Hopefully not. Whatever changes Mr Trump demands will likely be temporary, regardless.

xp84

4 days ago

good to know both parties apparently feel that “petty renaming of things” is a good use of time for the government. So we’ll just start every change in party control with a raft of renames to thumb our noses at “The Former Guy.” Productive.

Krasnol

4 days ago

So the clever ones should just leave the damage the stupid one did and just wait for their term to run out so the stupid ones can cause more damage, the clever ones can ignore and repeat?

Doesn't seem to be very clever to me.

xp84

4 days ago

"Stupid" = got way more votes than Harris

Your team is the one who chose to run Harris. Was that clever? Current front runners for 2028 include AOC. Sure to be another banner year for these clever 'Democratic Socialists.'

Krasnol

2 days ago

It's not "my" team. I come from a civilised country.

The fact you didn't even touch the topic but went full MAGA instead, shines a proper light at your original comment now. You just wanted to play the 'ol both sides derailment.

What I didn't understand though was what point you tried to make with "more votes". Yes, a country may have more stupid people vote then non-stupid. It happens all the time. So what?

xp84

a day ago

In the USA, the left is currently obsessed with touting their intellectual superiority over their political opponents. It doesn't occur to them that whether they're smarter or not, they don't deserve to rule because they do not have the support of the people -- that's the very mathematical basis of any democratic country. You know what I call "A minority of highly-educated self-righteous elites get to pass all the laws to govern those stupid rural dummies"? An aristocracy.

Both parties let their crackpots take the wheel, with very different results. The cravelnly corrupt buffoonery of Trump is the right-wing result. On the left, their idiots has rendered the party incapable of being taken seriously by grownups -- to an even greater extent than Trump's Republicans. That's the point.

> went full MAGA instead

? I don't support either of the two idiotic "tribes" in our present system, MAGA vs. Woke.

Krasnol

a day ago

> It doesn't occur to them that whether they're smarter or not, they don't deserve to rule because they do not have the support of the people

How doesn't it occur to them when they accepted it as a fact? For the second time. Unlike the stupid which up to today tell the story of the "stolen election".

> It doesn't occur to them that whether they're smarter or not, they don't deserve to rule because they do not have the support of the people -- that's the very mathematical basis of any democratic country.

I'm happy that you admit that most of those voters are in fact stupid. I still don't understand though why you would like to be ruled by the kings of stupid. I mean, you've become a joke on this planet. Every leader of stupid creates chaos and harm for everybody besides them (for now). So what are you proud of here exactly?

> You know what I call "A minority of highly-educated self-righteous elites get to pass all the laws to govern those stupid rural dummies"? An aristocracy.

Well, yeah, of course you'd call that because you don't know what the word means but how would you call what Trump does? I mean he literally employs his family...like...you know...in classic aristocratic systems. What do you call this?

> On the left, their idiots has rendered the party incapable of being taken seriously by grownups -- to an even greater extent than Trump's Republicans. That's the point.

So above you just talked down those grown-ups in favour of the stupid. Now grown-ups are the level a ruler needs to reach. So which is it?

You should leave the continent for some time and live somewhere else. You would recognise the damage the stupid have caused to the reputation of the whole country. You'd have to go very far back in history to find a Government so ridiculous as the current one.

I'd say Caligula would be a good candidate. Ludwig II of Bavaria for Trumps first term, where he didn't cause SO much damage.

xp84

4 days ago

It’s interesting how the “preserve traditional historical names - don’t change the names on things for political reasons” role flipped to the left when that particular person started renaming things. In this case especially - a body of water that is between two countries has no “correct” namesake. It merely has a “traditional” name justified by “that’s just always what we’ve called it.” Tradition suddenly became very important to the American left wing when that rename happened.