A couple of weeks ago we mentioned a brand new feature on the OpenStreetMap.org homepage. On the right hand side we have a new “?” button which lets you query the map.

• On openstreetmap.org, zoom in somewhere
• Click the “?” button to enter query mode
• Click the map on something you are interested in
• Hover over the results, and choose one to find out more

When you query a spot on the map, this new tool will retrieve nearby points of interest from the OpenStreetMap database, and let you quickly drill down to all of the detailed tagging information we have in that database.

More than a map

This new tool helps highlight a crucial point about OpenStreetMap. It’s so much more than just a visual map. OpenStreetMap is a rich database of geo-located information, only some of which is visible on the “standard” view of the map. Other information is visible via different layers (such as cycle routes presented on the cycling layer) and all of the data can be viewed by enabling the “map data” layer (also on the layer picker panel) but this query tool offers a new window into the OpenStreetMap data, and a new way to discover all the details our contributors are adding to the database.

For developers this data opens up a world of possibilities. All the data is available to download for free.

Some OpenStreetMap services will be off-line on 26th October 2014 for a planned maintenance period.

The OpenStreetMap Foundation, Operations Working Group have scheduled a short maintenance period which will occur from approximately 11:00 to 12:30 UTC, during which time the database will be offline.

This will mean you cannot use OpenStreetMap editors to load or save map data. The “standard” view of the map will remain available, but various other services will be impacted during this 1½ hour stretch. More specific information on services impacted. Actual outage times may vary within the service windows described above.

Thank you, in advance, for your patience and understanding during the maintenance window.

Thank you, as always, to the Operations Working Group, for their tireless efforts that keep OpenStreetMap services working smoothly.

In three weeks from today the international OpenStreetMap conference “State Of The Map” comes to Buenos Aires, Argentina.

stateofthemap.org

We shall be announcing the programme very soon, it’s taking us a while to process all the fantastic session submissions we received. Rest assured we have a great line-up in the making, with our unique blend of talk topics around cartography, community, technology, and local perspectives.

Buenos Aires photo cc-by-sa2.0 Ricardo Patiño

There are, of course, OpenStreetMappers throughout the globe, so it’s a shame we haven’t taken the international conference to the southern hemisphere before. In three week’s time we’ll be putting that right! A long journey for a lot of people, but (important geography fact) in the southern hemisphere November is spring/summer time! Book your flight now! (conference tickets are still available) Buenos Aires promises to be a superb destination for the annual gathering of our OpenStreetMap community.

Every week we pick an OpenStreetMap “Image Of The Week”. The featured image appears on the main page of the wiki.openstreetmap.org site. Here are the images from so far in 2014:

That’s just 2014, but we’ve been doing this since way back in 2006, forming an archived collection which you can browse. It’s a fascinating and inspiring mixture of maps and map styles, websites and software, photos of mapping parties & other events, and various other types of images.

If you come across an image which you would like to put forward as image of the week (either your own image or somebody else’s), head over to “Featured image proposals” and edit that page to make your suggestion there. Anyone can join in with the process of investigating, improving and discussing the suggestions, and picking an OpenStreetMap image of the week each week.

On our tenth birthday we can look back on a year in which our free and open world map has gone from strength to strength, being deployed by large companies such as Apple, Mapquest and Foursquare, and relief organisations such as Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) and the American Red Cross.

But now we can look back on ten years. In 2004 one man set out with a bicycle and a GPS recorder. Back then creating a map of the world from scratch seemed crazy to many people, but even so, people joined the effort. A few people at first, but 10 years later OpenStreetMap has grown to a global community with over 1.7 million registered members, with around 3,000 members editing the map every day. This map built by volunteers is now used for serious work: for example Médecins Sans Frontières works with OpenStreetMap to help its doctors in West Africa keep track of the current ebola outbreak.

We’re celebrating in cities all around the world : Toronto, Montréal, DC, Denver, Seattle, Athens, NY, LA, Phoenix, Lexington, Nashua, Cleveland, St Petersburg (US), St Petersburg (Russia), Moscow, London, Amersfoort, Birmingham, Barcelona, Dublin, Budapest, Passau, Paris, Zagreb, Zürich, Bangladesh, Taipei, Fukushima, Tokyo, Muko, Awaji, Ichinomiya, Hamamatsu, Cochabamba, and Santiago.

The Japanese community probably have the best cake:

…but the night is still young.

So in honour of ten years of OpenStreetMap, please join us to raise a glass (Make it a virtual glass if you can’t make it to one of these party locations)

Happy Birthday OpenStreetMap!

Next week OKFN’s Open Knowledge Festival takes place in Berlin bringing together open data practitioners from all over the planet. There is also a flurry of activities around OpenStreetMap, here is a run down. Are you in Berlin? Come out and meet other mappers.

• July 12/13 OpenStreetMap Hack weekend (side event, no festival pass needed)
• July 16 4.30 PM Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Workshop (part of regular festival schedule)
• July 16 7PM Open Mapping Happy Hour (side event, no festival pass needed)

…and plenty more open map data possibilities related to other sessions on the programme

There’s other conferences where OpenStreetMap will be making an appearance coming up soon too, including:

• FOSS4G 2014 in Bremen – Open Source GIS conference by the OSgeo foundation
• Wikimania 2014 in London – International conference of wikipedia and the wikimedia projects

Check out the wiki events list for these and many more events, and stay tuned for more news about our OpenStreetMap conference(s)

OpenStreetMap data includes “tags”, name=value pairs which provide a free-form folksonomy approach to classifying features. To get started mapping you don’t need to know about these. With a our easy to use “edit” interface, you can simply select from a range of feature types. For example if you select “post box”, then a node will be created with the “amenity=post_box” tag set on it.

But as you learn to contribute data, and certainly if you try to use OpenStreetMap data, you’ll most likely need to understand tags. To help you do this, there are a number of resources available.

You can search the OpenStreetMap wiki for tag documentation such as the Tag:amenity=post_box page. This documentation is created by the community, but rather than regarding this as the final word, understand that these wiki pages form part of a process to reach agreement on tags. You and everyone else in the community can help edit those pages to ensure the documentation is more exhaustive and more accurately reflecting the tags used by the mapping community.

But for a more direct view how tags are used by the mapping community, we have taginfo. This system counts up the ocurrances of tags in the OpenStreetMap database, and presents these statistics to give us a feel for which tags are most popular, and how many of these features we have mapped. For example, just now we see the amenity=post_box tag appears 153581 times in our database!

taginfo also mines the wiki for information, finds icons used in JOSM, provides links to Overpass Turbo, XAPI, and JOSM launcher, and generally brings information about tags together to connect different sources and users.

This system was developed by Jochen Topf several years ago, but building on similar ideas such as TagWatch and TagStat which came before it. These days taginfo is a crucial tool for understanding tags, and yesterday it was rehosted on OpenStreetMap Foundation servers with various changes described by Jochen on his blog

Seasons greetings to all OpenStreetMap contributors!

…and I hope you all had an OpenStreetMappy Christmas.

I know I did. On Christmas day I managed to use OpenStreetMap for our family Christmas walk, and contributed a bit more data (More on that here)

What other Christmassy map happenings have happened?

• It looks like User:ubahnverleih has turned his family Christmas walk into more of an extensive mapping expedition than I did!
• The german OpenStreetMap community lead the way with mapping Christmas Markets!
• Derick Rethans has been writing a “contributing advent” series of blogs posts in the run up to Christmas, including some posts on contributing to OpenStreetMap.
• MapBox have celebrated the holidays and visualised the holiday traffic!
• User:RudiXXL thinks they spotted santa in OpenStreetMap landuse shapes.

How was your OpenStreetMappy Christmas?