Below I will outline improvements for data interoperability regarding Wilderness Study Areas in the United States: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilderness_study_area

A few days ago, I asked the community about converting general GIS polygons into OSM multipolygon relations. I’ve searched online but havent found a workflow that fits my needs.

I’m planning to update and expand the administrative boundaries for Bali in OSM. I’ve already prepared the multipolygons for admin_level 5, 6, and 7 using single shared ways for efficiency. By leveraging Google Sheets, I’ve also compiled a comprehensive list of Wikidata, Wikipedia links, and multilingual names to better serve Bali’s international profile.

However, the conflation process is proving to be a challenge. The existing data is quite a “nightmare” to clean up; many roads and waterways are currently shared with administrative relations, and landuse or natural features are glued to the boundaries. Time to start untangling!

Mapping administrative boundaries in Indonesia can tricky especially when dealing with overlapping names. Here is my simplified workflow for preparing this data:

1. Data Sourcing

First, download the official spatial data from Peta Rupa Bumi by Badan Informasi Geospasial. This serves as the primary geometry source.

2. Extracting Place Nodes

Since the source data is in polygon format, I use QGIS to extract the centroids (points). These points are essential for creating the place=* tags that represent the center of each administrative area.

3. The Importance of Kemendagri Codes

The polygons include Kemendagri reference codes. These are vital for:

• 
  Conflation: Ensuring data matches across different sets.
  
• 
  Identification: Many villages (admin_level 7 or 8) share the same name. The code helps distinguish them within a Regency or Province.

4. Enriching Metadata

Using spreadsheet tools and conflation techniques, I cross-reference the data to add:

• 
  wikidata and wikipedia tags.
  
• 
  Multilingual names (name:en, etc.).

5. Geometry Processing

To follow OSM best practices, I convert the polygons into independent ways (polylines).

• 
  This allows adjacent areas to share a single boundary line via a multipolygon relation.
  
• 
  Once converted, I export the result as a .geojson file.

6. Final Tagging

Finally, I use the previously extracted place nodes to quickly copy and paste the relevant tags into the new multipolygon relations in my OSM editor.

🗺️ Entry 1 — Setting up JOSM & Plugins

Mapping Banjë, Albania

I started mapping the Banjë region in Albania by setting up my editing environment in JOSM.

⚙️ Setup

I configured JOSM with a set of plugins to support structured mapping and validation:

• utilsplugin2 – general productivity tools
• reltoolbox – relation and multipolygon editing
• waydownloader – working with connected geometries
• merge-overlap – cleaning overlapping features
• Relation Validation Plugin – checking data consistency
• FastDraw – faster geometry digitizing

I also explored additional plugins like contour-related tools for terrain-based mapping.

🗺️ Mapping Context

The focus area is Banjë (central Albania) — a landscape with: - Complex terrain (valleys, rivers, slopes)
- Mixed land use (forests, agriculture, settlements)
- Incomplete or inconsistent OSM coverage

🌱 Initial Observations

• Landuse classification is often fragmented or overlapping
• Boundaries between forest, farmland, and settlements are not always clear
• Many features require clean multipolygon structures
• Validation tools already highlight conflicts in relations

🎯 Next Steps

• Clean and structure landuse polygons (forest, farmland, residential)
• Resolve relation conflicts and validation errors
• Improve consistency of tagging using presets
• Start refining settlement structures and road connectivity

OpenStreetMap is a map of the world, created by people like you and free to use under an open license.

Gashamo Hawd Somali Ethiopia is the city of Hawd Zone Somali Regional State of Ethiopia.

Gashamo Hawd Somali Ethiopia is the city of Hawd Zone Somali Regional State of Ethiopia.

So, Ive been using Altilunium LocationPad for several of my personal projects until now. But recently, I encountered several problems.

I was recently reading Demographic deposit, dividend and debt by Sonalde Desai. Following the Standard Operating Procedure, I looked up this Sonalde person and turns out she is a researcher at a research institute in Delhi called National Council of …

UrbanEye3D 2.0 has been released!

I just published a hacky but effective tool to fix wrong tag values. This lead to some 50 edits only this morning.

Ive been working on Strado, a free tool that scores every neighborhood across 50 European cities using data from OpenStreetMap. I wanted to share the project with the OSM community since its built entirely on your work.

Following up on https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/lhirlimann/diary/404921, I discovered today that newer/better aerial imagery for some parts of Mongolia were available, hence doing me doing some edits.

As reported on the Irish OpenStreetMap website, we recently finished mapping all the buildings in Co. Down. Due to my goal to get high up in the UK statistics (I made it to #1), I apparently mapped 3,283 tasks, if Im reading the statistics right.

Welcome to The #questionable-edits OSM Iceberg!

I really love JOSM, and the more I use it, the more I discover that it offers some very useful features that some of you may not be aware of ! Even if some are less useful, simply knowing they exist opens up the possibility that you might find them u…

The Hub, Edinburgh rendered with Beakerboys OSM Building Viewer https://beakerboy.github.io/OSMBuilding/index.html?id=42997989

Back home with Mom for the weekend, when I picked her up after church, I was advised by everyone that taking the back exit from the church parking lot. What back exit? It wasnt on OSM or GM.

此文本同時提供 台灣華語版本
This article is also available in Taiwanese Mandarin

First meeting. Source of basemap (c) OpenStreetMap contributors.

%{count} contribution(s) in the last year

section on the user page, should be edited. For numbers greater than four digits, periods are placed in groups of three for easier reading, but OSM user profiles have numbers that are difficult to read, such as 1234565885. If we write this as 1.234.565.885 or 1,234,565,885. The contribution counter will be easier to read.

Yesterday, I attended the OpenStreetMap Local Chapters and Communities Congress 2026 online.

This text was written by me a couple weeks ago. In the mean time I noticed that my computer struggles with the amount of data to process. That’s why I will need to use another way how to create my map.

Yesterday or the day before, Florian contacted me to see could we map hogbacks on OpenStreetMap. Short answer: Yes.

I’ve recently learnt how to use the “Building” plugin on JOSM and it’s so slay.

Hello! I made my 1000th edit today which also just so happened to roughly coincide with the 1 year mark of my OSM journey. I have had so much fun learning about OSM and connecting with so many cool members of the community.

I started my work on OSM improving the data in my home town of Wilson Wyoming, which continues to be my main focus, although I have done some smaller projects outside of this area. It has been so rewarding to watch my work come together to create such a carefully detailed representation of its unique and beautiful geography. Through all this work I have not only deepened my passion for geographic data, I have had the pleasure of developing the understanding necessary to truly comprehend the marvel of the world’s greatest map, the open street map. I couldn’t be happier to be a part of such a remarkable feat of humanity and commendation to our planet.

Speaking of Wilson, I began a series of diary entries early on where I would provide updates for my “Wilson WY data overhaul project”… I have since stopped doing this and kinda wish I could delete them (if you know how to delete them let me know). Anyways, I bring this up because Wilson has served as a kind of playground where I have and continue to develop my process for creating the most useful, high detail, well tagged, good-lookin’ data possible. This unfortunately hasn’t happened without some growing pains if you will. There are many things that I am not super proud of. For example, the fact that Fish creek has 30 versions in its way history, or the many driveways, roads, and ponds that have an absolutely egregious amount of nodes due to my disdain for jagged curves and my proclivity for getting carried away in my endeavour to make every curve pretty. I am a victim to the coastline paradox. However, this is something I believe I have improved on. Anyways, this entry is mostly for my own personal posterity, but if you are reading this, or are interested in the work I have done on OSM please reach out to me. I absolutely love to make connections with other mappers!

In the last quarter of 2025, I was privileged to be part of the HOT Mentorship Program. I was a mentee in the third cohort, focusing on Open Community Building.

This post presents the results of a student project carried out by the following group: Pierrick Causeret, Humbert de Chastellux, Paul Enjalbert and Othman Ouhaddou.

Map of Irish Wetlands
https://wetland.maps.arcgis.com/apps/instant/sidebar/index.html?appid=0b602456f4e54b2b808b9cf8d6472cad

I’m new to this.

I did what most people probably do and added/adjusted footprints of houses in my neighborhood. Great but I soon noticed that there were choices to be made about what did or didn’t get included, what level of detail to go to, etc. and no really obvious source of guidance about that.

Which is probably just as well, because if there were masses of prescriptive guidance about every little thing a new user would get buried. Anyway. I settled on what seemed reasonable to me and fleshed out the neighborhood a bit. Fun.

I’m a private pilot, so I checked out my local airport to see how things looked there. It was really quite good in some respects, if a little out of date. But again since there’s no guidance the previous editors had just made reasonable assumptions and got on with it. I noticed a few taxiway connections were missing (I taxi along them regularly so I know they’re there!) and added them. Then realized that the previous editor had only been adding taxiways that correspond to the painted lines. Reasonable but in reality things are more joined up than that. Food for thought.

So I thought I would check out a large nearby airport. Whoever did this has made a different set of assumptions about what a reasonable level of detail is. Nothing wrong with them, just different.

Then I checked out Chicago O’Hare. Wow. Someone went to town here. Every single parking spot in the parking garage is individually mapped. That seems excessive (and dragged my machine to it’s knees as well). I’m sure some aggregation would be better. Never mind.

Checked out Newark. Much more reasonable level of detail here. But I suppose that depends on what you expect people to use it for. JFK is different again.

It seems like it would good to define use cases and detail levels for this. Not to be prescriptive, just to give editors some kind of framework to consider if it helps organize their work. The wiki does have some information but it’s more about the specifics than overall organization. I expect GIS professionals have a whole framework for this kind of thing but that would be overkill.

I’ll see if I can find anyone interested it working on this. I’m too new around here to figure out how to do that though.

For some reason, the sidewalks near main roads in Sandy have been deleted without much warning. I just have to question what is with these changes and who is responsible for removing the work of mine and others.

Hello,

I recently noticed that Someone, Which I do not know of, Has vandalised clyst vale by Removing the entire school, and replacing it with a sainsburys, ive wrote this to alert a mod to hopefully revert the changes at clyst vale

-SouthWestTrains1

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

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.

OpenStreetMap is a map of the world, created by people like you and free to use under an open license.

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

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

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