While editing this week’s edition of WeeklyOSM, I discovered that OSHDB version 1.0 has been released. So, I decided to test it by myself.

Set the bbox around Bekasi, Indonesia. Then set the filter to (key=highway, value=blank).

Then, I see the download button. Apparently, we can download the detailed CSV data.

So, it seems that the first highway edit happened around August 12, 2008.

Now I’m really curious, who is this OSM editor that contributed to the first highway ever around my city?

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After digging the API documentation, I found a solution.

Step 1 : Get the data

Run this python script. It will generate a json file.

import requests
URL = 'https://api.ohsome.org/v1/elementsFullHistory/geometry'
data = {"bboxes": "106.9216919,-6.4162955,107.1153259,-6.0982253", "time": "2008-01-01,2016-01-01", "filter": "highway=*"}
response = requests.post(URL, data=data)
print(response.text)

Note : It’s hard to manually construct the bbox. So, i use the JOSM editor to calculate the bbox for me.

Step 2 : Process the data

This code will sort the retrieved OSM objects (that json file from step 1) according to their creation date. Then it will output a nice markdown table, with links to OSMLab’s OSM Deep History, for further inspection.

import json
from datetime import datetime
from dateutil.parser import parse

f = open('bekasi.json')
data = json.load(f)
allobj = []

for i in data['features']:
	obj = {}
	fromT = parse(i['properties']['@validFrom'])
	obj['from'] = fromT
	obj['id'] = i['properties']['@osmId']
	allobj.append(obj)

allobj = sorted(allobj, key=lambda d: d['from'])
print("Created | OSM ID")
print("-|-")
for i in allobj:
	oid = str(i['id'])
	print(str(i['from'])+ " | "+"["+oid+"](https://osmlab.github.io/osm-deep-history/#/"+oid+")")

Here’s the result :

Minor Revision

Then I suddenly realized that, why I start the query from “2008-01-01”? Can we go even further? What happens if I set the start date to 2000, for example?

{
  "timestamp" : "2022-11-30T06:03:43.184642",
  "status" : 404,
  "message" : "The given time parameter is not completely within the timeframe (2007-10-08T00:00:00Z to 2022-11-20T21:00Z) of the underlying osh-data.",
  "requestUrl" : "https://api.ohsome.org/v1/elementsFullHistory/geometry"
}

Apparently, 2007-10-08 is the maximum limit. So, I recalculated the data, based around this limit. Here’s the revision.

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So, what is the first OSM highway edit around my city? I still don’t know. This statistics showed that OSM edit has already begun since 2005, but this API’s maximum limit is around 2007.