This article was originally written in French here. This English version was partly translated with DeepL.com.

OpenArdenneMap is an open-source map style designed for the production of topographic maps for printing. Based on OpenStreetMap data, it is available for use with QGIS and the Mapnik/cartoCSS libraries. Here is the winter 2025–26 release.

I started working on OpenArdenneMap about nine years ago. My aim was to create a map style for producing high-quality topographic maps intended for printing, using mainly OpenStreetMap data. The main challenge is to automate map production, to limit ‘manual’ corrections as much as possible (without eliminating them entirely). Since then, the style has been used in several mapping projects: together with colleagues, I have set up a website for downloading hiking maps (hiking.osm.be) and have been able to test the deployment of a tile server on https://www.nobohan.be/webmaps/oam-tile/.

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One of the most memorable phases of my OpenStreetMap journey was being part of the Autumn Mapping Sprint 2025, sponsored by Youth Innovation Lab. This was a funded mapping sprint that lasted for one full month, making it both exciting and challenging at the same time.

What made this experience even more intense was that, during the very same month, I was also involved in a one-month field campaign in Dolakha district as part of my studies. Managing both at the same time was not easy.

My days were filled with fieldwork—collecting data, traveling, and completing academic responsibilities. And yet, despite the physical exhaustion, I stayed committed to mapping. Every evening, I tried to make time—sometimes small, sometimes longer—to contribute to the sprint. It required discipline, time management, and a lot of determination.

There were moments when I felt overwhelmed, but I didn’t want to give up. Being part of a funded program and representing myself among advanced mappers motivated me to keep going. I reminded myself why I started this journey and how far I had already come.

Throughout the month, I continued mapping—adding buildings, improving roads, and refining data with care. Even with a busy schedule, I managed to stay consistent and complete my contributions.

Being recognized as one of the advanced mappers during this sprint made the experience even more meaningful. It wasn’t just about mapping anymore—it was about proving to myself that I could handle challenges and still stay committed to my goals.

Looking back, this month feels like a true test of my dedication. Balancing fieldwork and mapping taught me resilience, time management, and self-belief.

This experience showed me that no matter how busy life gets, with determination and passion, I can always find a way to keep going.

Looking back at my OpenStreetMap journey, two dates will always hold a very special place in my heart—June 21 and October 14.

On June 21, I achieved something I had been working toward for a long time: I became the top mapper in KU Youth Mappers. That moment felt surreal. From the days when I was just learning how to draw my first building on the map to reaching the top position—it was a journey filled with patience, consistency, and continuous learning. Every late night of mapping, every small correction, and every effort finally felt worth it.

But the journey didn’t stop there.

On October 14, I reached another incredible milestone—I became a top mapper in UN Mappers. This achievement felt even bigger, as it connected my work to a global level. Contributing alongside mappers from around the world and being recognized among them made me realize how far I had come.

These milestones are not just about rankings or titles. They represent growth, dedication, and the impact of consistent effort. From starting out as a beginner to becoming a leading contributor in both university and international communities, my journey has transformed me—not just as a mapper, but as a learner and contributor.

Sometimes I pause and think about how it all started with simple curiosity. And now, those small steps have led to achievements I once never imagined.

This journey reminds me that with passion and persistence, even the smallest edits can lead to the biggest milestones.

Before

After

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A future version of the UrbanEye3D plugin will support trees and other objects.

(Picture: Cathedral of the Assumption of Mary, Zagreb)

Note: this version is still in development, but should be relesed by the end of this month

Hello people, I’ve been Hoping to help my local town of Exeter and nearby plymouth, ive so far made houses in both sherford and torpoint, ive also named the schools of Clyst vale and Stoke hill, And im hoping to do more to help the community of OpenStreetMap

-SouthWestTrains1

Ciao a tutti. Come molti di voi già sapranno, ho aperto il voto sulla proposta OSM Civil Protection Areas, per mappare in OpenStreetMap aree di protezione civile ufficialmente designate come aree di attesa, ricovero, ammassamento soccorsi e accessi logistici di emergenza.​

In questo momento il voto è molto tirato, quindi ogni voto favorevole conta davvero. ​ Link diretto alla proposta: osm.wiki/Proposal:Civil_Protection_Areas ​

Mini guida per votare:

Fate login nella wiki OSM con il vostro account. ​

Aprite la proposta e scendete alla sezione Voting. ​

Cliccate su Edit source. ​

Aggiungete una riga con il vostro voto, seguendo il formato già usato nella pagina, per esempio I approve this proposal … –~~~~. ​

Salvate la modifica. ​ Grazie a chi riesce a leggere e votare.

Ihr wisst ja, ich hab’ einen OpenStreetMap-Fetisch :) Schon sehr lange trage ich gemeinsam mit der Schweizer OSM-Community die Idee rum, dass die ~2000 erfassten Gemeindegrenzen in OpenStreetMap besser gepflegt werden sollten.

Diese wurden vor ~14 Jahren in einem sogenannten Import in die OpenStreetMap-Datenbank eingepflegt und seither bei Gemeindefusionen Anfangs Jahr immer mal wieder gepflegt, aber nicht in toto überwacht.

Vor einiger Zeit habe ich im OSM Forum die Diskussion zur Grenzpflege begonnen, das dort angesprochene Tool der serbischen Community ist zwar sehr toll, aber der Umbau auf die Schweizerischen Gegebenheiten hat nicht befriedigend geklappt. Dies trotz der tollen Hilfe der SOSM mit einer virtuellen Maschine (mersi Datendelphin im Speziellen) auf der SOSM-Infrastruktur. Auf dieser VM lief das serbische Tool mit Anpassungen für die Schweiz, war aber nur schwer zu “bedienen”.

In einem Projekt bei der Arbeit habe ich mich etwas eingehender mit den sog. GitHub Actions beschäftigt, mit denen es möglich ist, ja nach Zustand eines GitHub-Projektes Aktionen durchzuführen, die ebenso auf einer virtuellen Infrastruktur (aber halt von Microsoft laufen). Eine solche Action baut beispielsweise aus etwas LaTeX-Code, der online liegt automatisch meinen Lebenslauf (ich hab’ keine Bewerbung offen, brauchte aber letzthin aus anderen Gründen einen Lebenslauf). Oder aus etwas Textschnipseln eine Webseite und ein PDF, das eine Pubikation ergeben wird.

Item, Programmcode im Internet etwas machen zu lassen, ist mit solchen Actions einfach, schnell iterierbar und etwas weniger komplex, als per ssh auf einem Server Python-Code laufen zu lassen.

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Westhay Moor & Honeygar Farm: osm.org/#map=16/51.19215/-2.78186

Shapwick Heath Nature Reserve & RSPB Ham Wall: osm.org/#map=15/51.15109/-2.79207

Erste Schritte

Ich habe gerade diese Funktion entdeckt. Und eigentlich klingt es nach einer tollen Idee, meine Ausflüge in einem persönlichen Blog zu dokumentieren. Vielleicht freue ich mich ja eines Tages, wenn ich das hier lese ^^

Ostatnio zauważyłem, że styl OSM Americana nie wyświetla w szczególny sposób numerów dróg wojewódzkich, w przeciwieństwie do dróg krajowych, w tym dróg ekspresowych i autostrad, co zgadza się z definicją, a raczej jej brakiem. Na podstawie opisu jednego z pull requestów w repozytorium tego stylu wywnioskowałem, że generator opiera się na tagu network w celu wywnioskowania kategorii.

Postanowiłem więc sprawdzić, jaka wartość tagu network jest wykorzystywana do oznaczania dróg wojewódzkich. Szybka kwerenda, wykonana przy użyciu głównej strony OSM, Overpass API i Taginfo doprowadziła mnie do wniosku, że drogi te oznacza się tagiem network=pl:regional.

Postanowiłem również sprawdzić, jak oznacza się drogi powiatowe i gminne. Jako że w artykule wiki o tagu network tego nie określono, postanowiłem dokonać samodzielnej analizy. W tym celu napisałem skrypt Pythona, który odpytuje server Overpass i wykorzystuje bibliotekę pandas w celu wygodnego przetwarzania tych danych.

Parametry wejściowe

Zapytanie do serwera Overpass miało następującą postać:

[out:csv(::id,name,ref,unsigned_ref,network)]; area(3600049715)->.pl; rel(area.pl)[type=route][route=road][network~"pl:.*",i]; out geom;

Najistotniejszymi tagami branymi pod uwagę w tej analizie są network, ref i unsigned_ref (ostatni z nich wzięty pod uwagę ze względu na sposób użycia w relacjach analogiczny do tego na liniach). Numer relacji i tag name są wykorzystywane w celu ręcznej weryfikacji zarówno wyników analizy, jak i samych relacji, a ponadto numer relacji służy jako indeks dla tabel biblioteki pandas.

Wyrażenia regularne dla numerów poszczególnych dróg wyglądały następująco:

• autostrady: ^A[0-9]{1,2}$
• drogi ekspresowe: ^S[0-9]{1,2}$
• pozostałe drogi krajowe: ^[0-9]{1,2}$
• drogi wojewódzkie: ^[0-9]{3}$
• drogi powiatowe: ^[0-9]{4}[ ]?[BCDEFGKLNOPRSTWZ]$
• drogi gminne: ^[0-9]{6}[ ]?[BCDEFGKLNOPRSTWZ]$

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Ceci recense les bibliothèques cartographiées sur OpenStreetMap à Genève et dans le canton, avec leurs catalogues en ligne.

Survol

Voici un petit survol de bibliothèques publiques, semi-publiques ou peut-être accessibles aux spécialistes.

a. “Bibliothèque de Genève” et les bibliothèques des musées

Bibliothèque	Adresse	Catalogue
Bibliothèque de Genève	Aile Salève, Promenade des Bastions 8	swisscovery
Centre d’iconographie de la Bibliothèque de Genève	Passage de la Tour 2	catalogue
Bibliothèque d’art et d’archéologie	Promenade du Pin 5	swisscovery
Bibliothèque CJB	Chemin de l’Impératrice 1, Chambésy	swisscovery
Bibliothèque du Musée d’ethnographie	Boulevard Carl-Vogt 67	swisscovery
Secteur d’Information Documentaire Spécialisé du Musée d’histoire des sciences	Villa Bartholoni, Rue de Lausanne 128	swisscovery
La Musicale	Maison des arts du Grütli, Rue du Général-Dufour 16	swisscovery
Bibliothèque du Musée Voltaire	Les Délices, Rue des Délices 25	swisscovery
Bibliothèque du Musée Ariana	Ariana, Avenue de la Paix 10	swisscovery

b. Bibliothèques municipales (BM) à Genève et dans les autres communes du canton

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Hello

I have been using OpenStreetMaps for navigation across the globe for multiple years free of charge. I think the time has come for me to give something back to this community.

Thank you wonderful people at OpenStreetMap for such a wonderful project! I hope my contributions will help.

Kind regards

The Vilnius Stroller

I’ve been mapping crosswalk corners using a single point for the curb (lowered or otherwise) on a small spur connecting the sidewalk to the crossing way, trying to balance: - One entity per feature (not duplicating the curb) - Not blocking the sidewalk routing (on the sidewalk, you don’t need to cross the curb to turn the corner) - Not blocking the crossing routing (if you cross one edge, then the next edge, you don’t necessarily need to stop at the curb unless the intersection has signals)

When I update an intersection that has the two sidewalk ways and two crosswalk ways meeting at a single curb point, or sidewalks crossing and connecting two separate curb points to the crossings (except where there actually are two curbs), I’ve been reworking the ways to match this structure.

The latest Pedestrian Working Group/Guide suggests a slightly different approach (examples at that link):

• Use a single point for the kerb where it meets the road.
• Only use a second curb POI if there are two distinct curb features.
• Use a spur connecting the curb to the two branches of sidewalk.
• Allow the crossing ways to meet at the curb point.

It makes sense, and it’s cleaner than the way I’ve been trying to put the curb in the middle of that stub (and more accurate in that the kerb isn’t in the middle of the sidewalk), so going forward I’ll use that scheme instead.

Unfortunately I can’t just turn off the “Barrier blocking highway” rule in Osmose, because it’s still needed to find places where the sidewalks meet incorrectly at the curb. :shrug:

I am happy to annouce that, after a long time we, the OpenStreetMap Carto maintainers, have prepared a new major release of the OpenStreetMap Carto stylesheet (the default stylesheet on the OSM website). Once changes are deployed on openstreetmap.org it will take a couple of days before all tiles show the new rendering.

The main change that warrants a new major release is the move to the osm2pgsql flex backend. This now requires an osm2pgsql version >= 1.8.0. It, so far, only comes with very few and subtle changes in rendering results related to changes in defaults in polygon/linestring classification of closed ways. The database schema is explicitly meant to be backwards compatible from the style side so style users who render different styles from the same database should be able to continue to do so without problems. We hope to use the additional flexibility of osm2pgsql in the future, but we have decided to do this step by step - and with this release only make the formal move but not yet make larger changes to the database. Deployments none the less should do a full database reload.

What we have, however, in this release is an additional table with the commonly used values for shop and office tags. This is generated and filled with an sql script (common-values.sql) that is included in the style. This needs to be run on the database before using the style - like existing indexes.sql and functions.sql.

Here are some details on the visible changes this release brings to the style.

Stop shop/office catch-all

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Android 13 was released in August 2022, not yesterday, but on the other hand not so long ago.

Why is this relevant?

With Android 14 google started updating the root certificates¹ with updates to its “play” services², prior to that they were only updated with full system updates and while now you can count on such updates for multiple years that used to be very different.

This is a problem for apps running on older devices that need to access resources on the Internet with encrypted connections (that is with https) as not only can such a resource change its certificate provider and potentially by doing that change the relevant certificate authority, certificates can expire or otherwise be invalidated. If that happens the resource is essentially unusable without an update to the certificate authorities.

This is not a new problem, particularly for Vespucci³ as we support devices going back to Android 5 and without the app bringing its own copy of the relevant root certificate for Let’s Encrypt⁴ along, you wouldn’t have been able to access openstreetmap.org for years on old phones.

So it shouldn’t have been a surprise when on last Saturday an issue was opened complaining that the Polish governments geoportal was erroring⁵, but what issues users report is not always straight forward, and this was likely the first “important” source that ran in to the problem.

Now there is a quick fix and that is that the user installs the relevant certificates on their device themselves, this requires that the relevant app trusts user installed certificates and I’ve enabled that on V21.2.4 that is being distributed now. What the situation is with this configuration with other apps is unclear.

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Civil Protection Areas proposal → VOTING PHASE

After 3+ weeks of silence following the RFC discussion (no further comments/objections), the proposal is now officially in Voting Phase!

📋 Wiki: osm.wiki/Proposal:Civil_Protection_Areas

🗳️ Vote until: March 23, 2026

🖼️ Live demo: https://andreadp271.github.io/civil_protection_areas_osm/

Key improvements from RFC feedback:

• Comparison tables vs assembly_point/disaster_help_point

• Clear shelter area distinctions (outdoor vs indoor)

• Refined rescue staging/logistics definitions

Please cast your {{vote

yes}}, {{vote

no}} or {{vote

abstain}} on the Wiki!

身近な標高(3/13追記・修正)

　標高といえば、一般的に山頂の高さをイメージすると思う。
あとは水準点、基準点とか… なので、eleを日常的に入力する機会は多くないかもしれない。
JA:Key:ele

入力したことないって人も多いだろうが、意外と標高は身近なところで表示されている。
それは…

1. 海抜（標高）表示板

　国土交通省が東日本大震災による津波被害を踏まえ、対策として海抜情報(海抜表示シート)を提供。
街路灯に信号、道路標識などに貼り付けており、海沿いの地域では多く設置されている。

ele=3
inscription=ここの地盤は海抜(標高)3m
man_made=sign

自治体も電柱に貼ってたりする。向きによって見落としがち。

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Mentre scarico alcuni dati dal geoportale della Regione Lombardia, guardo gli ultimi nodi mappati e noto che molti di questi sono defibrillatori.

Ma perché?

Direi che è iniziato per caso, quando ne sono stati aggiunti alcuni nel campus universitario che frequento. Il senso però lo trovo qualche tempo dopo, quando alla festa di laurea di una delle mie migliori amiche la zia della festeggiata - cardiologa - mi fa giustamente notare che durante le emergenze, quando la velocità conta, è meglio sapere dove sono piuttosto che non saperlo affatto.

E questa cosa mi fa riflettere, mi risuona ininterrottamente nella testa, soprattutto se consideriamo l’attività di mapping non solo come “raccolta di dati georiferiti” ma anche come possibilità concreta di migliorare (e talvolta salvare) la vita delle persone intorno a noi.

Da allora, anche aiutandomi con MapComplete che in questo caso mi risulta utilissima, mappo tutti i defibrillatori che mi passano davanti agli occhi. Anche allungando i tempi di viaggio per fermarmi a quella fermata che mai avrei frequentato (dai, chi scende a Caiazzo?), anche per confermare lo stato di quelli esistenti.

Avrà effettivamente dei risvolti positivi sulla vita delle persone? Chi lo sa. Intanto ci proviamo.

quelli che ho mappato

l’andamento a Milano

l’andamento nella Città Metropolitana

Rail trails with route relations with railway=abandoned to denote a rail trail is not working. When the named “bike route” enters city streets or along side walks where the railroad never went this becomes and tagging nightmare.

I have had to remove railway=abandoned from a route relation in British Columbia and in New Hampshire where these were both issues. osm.org/note/5066887#map=15/41.40203/-73.62096

osm.org/note/4680502#map=15/49.49511/-121.22581

Can we find a better tags to mark bike routes with rail trail?
this is specific to route relations and not current tags for infrastructure, railway=abandoned still works for infrastructure

I would propose something like railway=trail so we keep this straight. It looks like railtrail=yes is a tag.

Yours in Mapping Natfoot

this is related to my other project on routing and bike routes. ask if you want to know more.