The opening session of the State of the Map 2022 conference.

OpenStreetMap is the human-made map of the world. But how can one tiny human still make a difference in a project used by megacorps and crucial to millions of app and website users every day? How does OSM retain its individualism in a world that wants it to be consistent, orderly and predictable? Is it game over for the experimental, iconoclastic, independent map? Richard Fairhurst offers a challenging but upbeat look at the changing landscape for the OpenStreetMap mapper, user and developer.

MapRoulette was first announced at State of the Map US in 2012 as a tool to solve the many errors introduced by the import of TIGER road data in the United States. Since then, MapRoulette has been used for map improvements and guided data imports around the world. In this talk, MapRoulette creator Martijn van Exel will look at some of the achievements, lessons learned, and the evolution from a single purpose tool to a micro-tasking platform.

Having made your first edits with JOSM, there are a couple of tips and tricks to learn to make your daily mapping life in this JOSM easier. JOSM, considered an advanced mappers tool, is an easy-to-use OSM software that makes mapping in OSM easier and more interesting using plugins and various mapping tools.

By 2025, HOT aims that communities in 94 countries vulnerable to disaster or experiencing multidimensional poverty are equipped and able to map the locations where they live and work. We believe that accessible mobile mapping tools are key to this effort. Since I started working for HOT in January 2022, I have done informal interviews, observations, focus groups and experiments with more than 100 regional users, primarily in East Africa, looking at the accessibility of current OSM mobile editing tools. Sharing this research with the wider community will help everyone build technology that fits the needs on the ground.

Presentation of the work we've done to adapt the OSM Carto style to vector tiles. We will take you through the making-of the cartography, step by step, scale by scale.
Available on MapTiler Cloud (https://cloud.maptiler.com/maps/openstreetmap/), the style will be integrated into the next version of the OpenMapTiles project.

We will also show you how to use this style in QGIS and how to display it on 3D maps with MapLibre.

Boundary conflation is a sensitive and difficult problem to solve. When administrative boundary data is available from authoritative sources for OSM, it is imperative that we have the ability to analyze boundaries for import and deduce if conflation with OSM ways can be done hopefully in a semi-automatic fashion. "Admin Boundary Conflation" is a special-purpose tool made for the purpose and this talk will introduce the workings of the tool to the audience along with the various output statistics available during the process. Currently, the tool is utilized for reporting geometric area differences of 0.01% in the 99th percentile of 5000 municipalities in Serbia within 20 minutes.

Usability testing can be done without hordes of users to observe, in fact just three people is likely to give very useful hints.

And it is almost certainly more useful than expected, and your software is likely not as good as you expect.

This is based on my experience with using user testing while developing StreetComplete.

This birds of a feather session is dedicated to humanitarian topics, and will be provided to you by the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) as part of their unSummit event series.

OpenStreetMap consists of tagged nodes, ways and relations. Many use cases of geographic data, however, need a tabular dataset of points, lines and polygons. Processing OSM into derivative datasets is a crucial task that can benefit from new tools and formats. This talk will cover several topics around this theme, including:

• Existing approaches such as the Export Tool
• Why FlatGeobuf is a suitable forwards-thinking format
• Computational challenges for processing global-scale relations
• A new open-source program, Protoshapes, to generate admin polygons in FlatGeobuf format
• Efficient approaches for global datasets such as coastlines, oceans, and road connectivity
• Frequently updating datasets using the open-source OSM Express database

Lightning talks

Join the Local Chapters Congress to learn about what other chapters are doing. Even if you are not on a Chapter but are a local organizer, feel free to join!

We will focus on:
- how to turn actions that work locally in projects that can be ran globally
- how local groups can best help each other

Understanding the limitations of data is hard.

Some tags are missing, and some tend to be present only when others are. Is the missing tag saying something, is it just unknown? When tags take yes/no values, is a missing tag an implicit "no", maybe the tag "does not apply", or something else…?

This talk doesn’t have answers. It’s the journey we took through an investigation of road data in London. What we found, what we think about what we found, and ideas of things to compute and visualise, before performing an analysis - or to decide if the data is just not suitable for this analysis.

We would like to share our feedback on facilitating OSM participatory mapping workshops for climate change adaptation projects with OSM local communities
Since 2015, CartONG has been expanding its work into the domain of participatory mapping, first by partnering with the international Missing Maps project, and then by working to develop a wider set of tools and methodologies.
Over the last 12 months, we had the opportunity to support two climate change adaptation projects, one in Tajikistan for the German Corporation for International Cooperation (GIZ) and the other in Madagascar in the Morombe region for Secours Islamique France.

The OSM data model with its nodes, ways, and relations has done an amazing job for us over the years. It has seen very little changes since relations were introduced 15 years ago. But there are some real problems with the data model. With the experience of those 15 years behind us, its time to tackle some improvements.

This talk will outline the problems with the data model, show ideas for improvements, and discuss possible ways that can move us forward step by step.

Through open mapping, we hope to inspire local youths and leaders to use technology to improve and create sustainable local governance system. We engaged 44 youths from 3 municipalities to participate in open mapping in first phase. In second phase, we gathered 10 IT officials from province 2 and highlighted OSM to connect geospatial elements for better local-level administration.

Here, we will discuss our methodological framework, challenges, how we gained support from local units to coordinate with community youth, and impacts we successfully created. This talk will be relevant to those interested in laying a strong foundation not only for better governance but also for engaging youths.

Pre-recorded lightning talks submitted in advance by people around the world.

Christopher Beddow takes us on a journey of how to map a small town using a variety of tools. The goal was to test and prove how much OpenStreetMap can be enriched using RapiD buildings and roads, and Mapillary map features, traffic signs, and imagery.

He evaluates a small town in the western United States that is far from any mapping community and has very little data, and demonstrates how a vivid dataset can be added to OSM. In addition, he compares this to a small town in Switzerland, demonstrating how new details can still be added to a place that is heavily mapped by a strong local community.

OSM has an unrestricted tagging model. Mappers can invent and use any tags.
While this is part of OSM's success story, it has lead to a database where
the globe is described in ever greater detail. In this talk we want to
explore how users of OSM data handle a tagging model with so few constraints.
Richard, the owner of cycle.travel, and Sarah, maintainer of Nominatim, team
up to share their experiences of a decade of working with, and occasionally
fighting against, OSM's ever evolving tagging schema.

Designing hyperlocal maps starts with understanding the users in their day-to-day journey through some user research method and why the current digital maps experience does not provide a complete experience for them to navigate and explore the neighborhood. This talk will provide the audience the insights into the mobility lifestyle of the local people in tier 2 cities and how the GrabMaps design team translates into mobile app design to help improve the quality of life for our users. The designer will also share what are some of the key learnings when designing for Southeast Asia.

Coverage of maxspeed data in OpenStreetMap is very sketchy (about 12%). This situation is unlikely to change because the limits are often not signed explicitly. So, data consumers such as router software need to compensate huge holes in the data with more or less rough estimates based on other data.

This talk shall explore a method how to infer default speed limits for different vehicle and road types more precisely for each country.

Lighting talks registered during the State of the Map conference.

Digital maps are ubiquitous tools in our everyday life. In the early 90s, the idea of browsing the world digitally and visiting any place was groundbreaking. The first solution to this problem is known as "TerraVision", which was breathtaking. Today, the idea of exploring your surroundings using digital maps has become normal.

But how do these maps work? In this talk, I want to provide an overview of the foundations of digital mapping solutions. Differences between maps which use vector data and rasterized satellite imaginary will be outlined. Furthermore, a new and open-source map renderer called maplibre-rs will be presented, which is created using Rust and WebGPU.

RapiD is the OpenStreetMap editor that enables users to access a wide variety of shared open data and a machine learning generated predictions that can bring new detail to the map. In 2022, the team at Meta upgraded RapiD to enable users to validate and verify Mapillary detections from images and add data to OpenStreetMap. Join us in an instructional workshop and mapathon where we will learn how Youthmappers in Sierra Leone are using Mapillaryto map the power grid across the country, and how the same workflow can be applied to map electricity availability and lighting around the world, anywhere users capture Mapillary and utilize RapiD to enrich OpenStreetMap.

Across OpenStreetMap there are ways to get involved from working groups to events to boards. How can we increase and deepen participation across the world? What is the current state of engagement/governance in OSM? What do we need to do to improve? What are some of the lessons from other open organizations?

The geospatial world is moving to cloud-first and cloud-native approaches. Movements like STAC and COG have transformed how people use raster data in the last couple of years. OpenStreetMap has much to gain from thinking about different cloud infrastructure architectures. This talk will discuss what it takes to run the OpenStreetMap ecosystem in the cloud and present the history and work on a project called OSM Seed. We learned so much while building OSM Seed and think it can be a blueprint for running OpenStreetMap on cloud infrastructure.

Every day hundreds of people sign up for OpenStreetMap. We have several active OpenStreetMap communities, communities that are struggling to sustain themselves and at the same time, there are countries with no existing OpenStreetMap communities despite having contributors from those countries.
This idea of a community playbook is to act as a guide for persons interested in starting up an OSM community and sustaining OSM communities with lessons drawn from existing communities.

The community playbook is based on 4 themes; Identifying local community issues, attracting and engaging students, Connecting contributors motivation to mapping and Training

The MapOSMatic web frontend allows to create printable maps from OSM
data interactively. This is not the only way to use its rendering
backend, it is also possible to directly use its ocitysmap Python
library to render maps from your own Python code and a local
stylesheet and database setup, or to use the REST-like API of the web
frontend to send automated render requests to a MapOSMatic web
instance from almost any programming language without any local setup
effort.

The presentation will give a short overview of both API variants,
showing the different options to interact with the MapOSMatic render
infrastructure programmatically.

As example applications an alternative neighbourhood

Open data is a trend in Taiwan, and some community members of OpenStreetMap or Wikidata are importing or merging information they obtain from government sources into the corresponding OpenStreetMap and Wikidata Database. The village dataset is available by sharp file and detains metadata with reference numbers, and the river dataset covered big rivers in Taiwan. In this talk, I will talk about the process of importing data, maintaining data, and linking each data not only with the government source but also to OpenStreetMap and Wikidata.

This talk will cover the growing New York City OpenStreetMap community and our efforts at coordinating mapping our cities’ quirks into the OSM data model. New York City (and much of America) has sidewalks that end abruptly, intersections without proper pedestrian control, uncontrolled slip lanes, bike paths that lead into stairways, crossings without curb cuts. Mapping these features helps NYC pedestrians analyze conditions, report and advocate for changes.

Pre-recorded lightning talks submitted in advance by people around the world.

Every day millions of users experience delightful features on Bing Maps. Each user, regardless of their technical background, possesses a wealth of local knowledge that can help improve map data which for many country regions comes from OpenStreetMap. The common OSM editorial tools iD & JOSM are far too advanced for our users. Hence, we embarked on a mission to build a very simple tool - MapBuilder - that can guide users to volunteer their local knowledge to update map data via a set of guided screens. This talk will focus on the following:
- First features
- Building community engagement
- Identifying data gaps
- Potential risks and mitigations

OpenStreetMap has proven to be a really interesting and valuable classroom instrument. Making students work with OSM allows them to develop the soft skills entailed in cooperation, to interact with something bigger than their class or school and to give their contribution for the sake of the collectivity. In this particular experienced, we worked on the local area of Bari with a class with 17 female students of a "Liceo Economico-Sociale", a school not particularly engaged in the STEM field. Thus, we also wanted to help them get more confident with the STEM field, which desperately need more diversity. Furthermore, focus has been on accessibility.

The last 10 years were quite turbulent for the iD editor: After the initial idea from Richard Fairhurst was quickly picked up by a developer team at Mapbox, the editor became OSM’s default map editor almost exactly 9 years ago today. Since then, different Maintainers have managed the project, constantly enhancing its functionality and data models like iD’s built in tagging presets.

This talk will present a condensed overview of the evolution of the iD editor since 2012 and, more importantly, showcase what still lies ahead of it: Small and large improvements to the user interface, performance, data validation, customization, integration of external services and more.

OpenStreetMap is a huge repository of geographic information – but how accessible is it? This panel aims at enlighting existing educational activities and platforms around OpenStreetMap topics, including editing, data usage and community governance, with the goal of exploring how new users and data consumers can approach OpenStreetMap in an easier way, and eventually widespread its adoption. During the panel we will discuss and share educational practices, experiences and tools and challenges.

OpenStreetMap is a collector's dream. While there is a finite set of stamps or coins, there are millions of shops and beauty salons, and new ones are opened every day. Yay, collect them all for the map! (And make the map better in the process, of course.) Alas, this task was made tedious, virtually impossible by our current tools. Not as much for adding — but for updating the data we've already collected, and finding what's missing. I've talked many times of this problem, and this year I think I've fixed it. This year changes everything for how POI are handled in OpenStreetMap.

Digital maps are ubiquitous tools in our everyday life. In the early 90s, the idea of browsing the world digitally and visiting any place was groundbreaking. The first solution to this problem is known as "TerraVision", which was breathtaking. Today, the idea of exploring your surroundings using digital maps has become normal.

But how do these maps work? In this talk, I want to provide an overview of the foundations of digital mapping solutions. Differences between maps which use vector data and rasterized satellite imaginary will be outlined. Furthermore, a new and open-source map renderer called maplibre-rs will be presented, which is created using Rust and WebGPU.

Our digital champions project in Tanzania has transformed the lives of 353 women who had never used a smartphone before into confident advocates of mapping in their extremely marginalised communities. They have delivered training to over 9000 women in these villages and reported over 470 cases of gender based violence in their villages to the police and social services who have then used the maps to find and protect these women. Giving local women and youth the digital tools to protect their sisters in their communities is an extremely cost effective, long term solution to build up our mapping community and make it more inclusive, and share lessons learnt

OSM is almost 20 years old and we already achieved so much. What if the governance of the project as well as our relationship to time and money were the biggest obstacles to ensure a bright future?
Let’s discuss the priorities to unleash the full potential of our community.

This workshop is aimed at everyone interested in using OpenStreetMap (OSM) to support sustainable transport planning, in professional or advocacy contexts. The focus will be on getting started, identifying, visualizing, and analyzing key tags and identifying gaps in walking, cycling, and wheeling networks. Participants will place OSM data in the context of other data sources to identify its unique advantages. The workshop will be practical and get users started with key ‘tools of the trade’ in the areas: R (used for live demo), Python, A/B Street, and osm2streets. By the end of the workshop, you will know how to add value to OSM data to support sustainable transport planning.

OpenStreetMap Foundation Board Ask Us Anything (i.e. AMA). We will take questions from the audience, or other questions that people can submit before the event, and we will talk about and answer them. We can talk about the past actions of the board, and what future plans we have.

The Amazon Forest, its traditional peoples, and riverside communities represent an immense challenge for official cartography, due to scale and extension factors. This presentation aims to show the experiences of the Unificar Ações e Informações Geoespaciais (UAIGeo) chapter of the Brazilian YouthMappers in mapping riverside communities in the Amazon rainforest region, focusing on the city of Tefé and its islands. Due to its female leadership role and the goals of empowering young women in geospatial and technical skills, the presentation emphasizes the importance of engaging and encouraging female students to link mapping and female empowerment.

Mapping is time-consuming and requires a high workforce when it comes to keeping maps up-to-date. Mapillary brings a different approach to geospatial data collection with street-level imagery. This approach allows communities to collect geospatial data faster and cheaper. But can Mapillary-generated data be useful for enriching OpenStreetMap? In this study, Mapillary-extracted map data will be examined against ground truth to assess data quality on contributing to OpenStreetMap.

What is the state of the map in 2022 and how did we get here? Everyone who has used and contributed to OSM knows that the map is constantly evolving: new objects are added, existing data is adjusted and eventually gets deleted. In this workshop we want to explain and show hands-on how you can analyze mapping activity over time through the ohsome framework and how you can interpret the changes, e.g. in respect to data quality, and by combining the ohsome approach with other tools.

Across OpenStreetMap there are ways to get involved from working groups to events to boards. How can we increase and deepen participation across the world? What is the current state of engagement/governance in OSM? What do we need to do to improve? What are some of the lessons from other open organizations?

Lighting talks registered during the State of the Map conference.

QGIS is one of the most used Opensource GIS software with some native functionalities to work with OSM data. Either with raster layer as a basemap, or with vector, QGIS can deal with OSM data. Depending on the amount of data to work with, the need to "refresh" the data (from the main OSM database), the extent of the coverage, different plugins or technologies are possible.
This presentation will try to give an overview how it's possible to use OpenStreetMap data according to different situations (Geocoding, TMS/WMS, OverpassAPI, PostgreSQL…). The presentation will show how you can contribute to QuickOSM to add some default « mappreset » to QuickOSM on GitHub.

This session will provide an introduction to the OpenStreetMap operations team, what OpenStreetMap.org services we are responsible for building and maintaining.

Grant recently became the OpenStreetMap Foundation's first full-time employee. Grant will present how he is helping improve reliability and security of the project's technology and infrastructure.

During the 2019-2020 pilot supported by Microsoft, 18 million building footprints were automatically extracted from satellite imagery for all of Tanzania and Uganda. HOT found that on average, mappers working without AI assistance could map between 1000-1500 buildings per working day. For areas with high-quality AI output, providing mappers with AI-generated building footprint suggestions increased this rate to up to 2500-3000 buildings per day approximately doubling the rate at which building data could be added to OpenStreetMap, which is the crucial link for making it available to the humanitarian information management community.

Language barrier and the default to English puts non-English speakers at a systemic disadvantage throughout open mapping communities and humanitarian open mapping activities resulting in significant missed participation and impact. We held experimentation on language translations of key resources identified by collaborators coming from local OSM communities and we hope to share the findings in this talk.

It’s easy to see how OpenStreetMap could be leveraged to improve the completeness and freshness of government geospatial datasets. So why aren’t all governments using OpenStreetMap? In the US, the ODbL license has prevented government agencies from using the data. Public Domain Map aims to resolve this (and other challenges) by providing a workflow that allows contributions to be used in both OpenStreetMap and public domain US Government databases. We will share the journey of Public Domain Map, and importantly, how the project is bringing together US federal agencies and open source contributors to meet this goal.

The United Nations Global Service Center (UNGSC) is developing Virtual Reality applications utilizing OpenStreetMap data. Through a Virtual Reality (VR) pilot project, UNGSC aims to provide UN peacekeepers on the field with 3D digital replicas of the cities in which they are operating, building a sandbox that enhances operational planning with simulations. In order to develop such applications, OpenStreetMap buildings are collaboratively edited, validated and ingested. Field mapping and street-level imagery are also extremely important to add details to the rendered buildings. There could be the possibility to organise a live demo through VR headset.

Pre-recorded lightning talks submitted in advance by people around the world.

This workshop is aimed at everyone interested in using OpenStreetMap (OSM) to support sustainable transport planning, in professional or advocacy contexts. The focus will be on getting started, identifying, visualizing, and analyzing key tags and identifying gaps in walking, cycling, and wheeling networks. Participants will place OSM data in the context of other data sources to identify its unique advantages. The workshop will be practical and get users started with key ‘tools of the trade’ in the areas: R (used for live demo), Python, A/B Street, and osm2streets. By the end of the workshop, you will know how to add value to OSM data to support sustainable transport planning.

OpenStreetMap has many details about streets, but applications rendering or simulating lane-level detail face many challenges: determining lane properties along one street, calculating geometry of streets and junctions, handling motorway entrances, dual carriageways, dog-leg intersections, placement tags, and parallel sidewalks and cycleways. osm2streets is a new effort to produce a cleaned-up street network graph with geometry. It's a Rust library, designed to be integrated with browser apps like iD or native/Java apps like JOSM. The goal is to consolidate community efforts to solve these data transformation problems, and to produce high-detail vector maps and apps for improving lane tagging with immediate visual feedback.

Human factor is one of the most crucial elements in crowdsourced mapping. This research explores how human bias affects the mapping process and whether such effects can be mitigated through targeted training with a behavioral experiment. The experiment uses a two-group randomized design. The treatment group receives more advanced training than the control group. There are two goals for the experiment. First, we aim to identify the common types of bias that amateurs from a specific demographic community have when using OSM. Second, we plan to explore whether training is helpful for reducing those biases and improve the quality of mapping.

Digital maps are ubiquitous tools in our everyday life. In the early 90s, the idea of browsing the world digitally and visiting any place was groundbreaking. The first solution to this problem is known as "TerraVision", which was breathtaking. Today, the idea of exploring your surroundings using digital maps has become normal.

But how do these maps work? In this talk, I want to provide an overview of the foundations of digital mapping solutions. Differences between maps which use vector data and rasterized satellite imaginary will be outlined. Furthermore, a new and open-source map renderer called maplibre-rs will be presented, which is created using Rust and WebGPU.

RapiD is the OpenStreetMap editor that enables users to access a wide variety of shared open data and a machine learning generated predictions that can bring new detail to the map. In 2022, the team at Meta upgraded RapiD to enable users to validate and verify Mapillary detections from images and add data to OpenStreetMap. Join us in an instructional workshop and mapathon where we will learn how Youthmappers in Sierra Leone are using Mapillaryto map the power grid across the country, and how the same workflow can be applied to map electricity availability and lighting around the world, anywhere users capture Mapillary and utilize RapiD to enrich OpenStreetMap.

What must be mapped to make routing for prams and wheelchairs practical? Three years ago, the local meet-up in Dortmund, Germany, started a campaign to make step-free routing available for the general public.

The lessons learned mean that such routing is possible, but there is a lot missing to map - both in Dortmund and in all other parts of the world.

Map the essential where fellow mappers are sparse. And codify the full ground truth where the passion allows it. I hope to encourage mappers for the quest to get their neighbourhood ready for wheelchairs, prams and all the other pedestrians!

Sparked by concerns about OpenStreetMap's role in how the public accesses and recreates on protected lands, OpenStreetMap US volunteers, navigation app developers, national agencies and public land managers formed the OpenStreetMap US Trails Working Group in 2021. Bringing together a diversity of perspectives on trail mapping practices, trail safety, and protecting the environment, this group is working to address on-the-ground challenges, tagging schemes, authoritative data, and other topics related to mapping trails in OSM. Learn how this group is collaboratively developing solutions for responsible trail mapping in OpenStreetMap.

Lighting talks registered during the State of the Map conference.

In this workshop, you'll learn the basics of setting up your own mapcomplete theme.

After a short introduction, explanation of some common pitfalls and a technical explanation, you're invited to open up your laptop (or tablet) and can try it out yourself while I'm around to answer some questions.

OpenIndoor is an open source SaaS that uses OpenStreetMap indoor data to display a 3D graphical rendering of building interiors. The resulting map offers a gamified experience to meet different types of needs: indoor navigation, data representation, immersive tour etc.
We will discuss how we use the available open data and the Maplibre engine to address these different use cases.

Follow the OSM journey of the Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) from a mapathon in Berlin in 2014 to creating and contributing geodata for numerous MSF operations through the Missing Maps project. This talk will be about how MSF uses OpenStreetMap internally and how we contribute through remote and field mapping. We will also share the lessons learned and reflect on the biggest challenges for MSF in creating and using the OSM data.

Wikimedia Italia, the Italian OpenStreetMap Local Chapter of the OSM Foundation, presents its activities, online infrastructure developed to support OpenStreetMap in Italy and the Italian community. The talk will share the experience, situations and factors that have influenced agreat collaboration with the local contributors and institutions during the last years.

The closing session of the State of the Map 2022 conference.