10 Years iD Editor – The Road Ahead
2022-08-20 , Auditorium A

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.


Almost exactly 9 years ago, the iD editor became OSM's default editor. But its core idea was first presented even a year before that.

Looking back at the past 10 years history shows that the project has undergone quite a few different phases: The initial sparks and the coining of the name by Richard Fairhurst were followed up shortly by a rapid development phase by a team of Mapbox engineers resulting in iD being ready to stand in as OSM’s default map editor. Since then, different Maintainers have managed the project, constantly enhancing its functionality and data models like iD’s built in tagging presets..

In the last couple of years, the iD editor has also seen some usage outside of the main OSM website, for example in the form of Forks like the RapiD editor, advancing the applicability in their own specialized use cases and scenarios.

This talk will present a condensed overview of the development of the iD editor since 2012 and, more importantly, showcases what still lies ahead of it: Small and large improvements to the user interface, performance, data validation, customization, integration of external services and more. All with the goal to make iD fit for next 10 years and more to come.


Affiliation

OpenStreetMap Foundation

Talk keywords

iD editor mapping

See also: slides (700.0 KB)

Since November 2021 I maintain the iD editor for the OpenStreetMap Foundation. I do also have a part time position at HeiGIT (Heidelberg Institute for Geoinformation Technology), where I contribute to software for academic research about OSM data. I'm responsible for overpass-turbo, the web interface for the Overpass API. See my user page on the OSM wiki for further OSM related projects I contribute to.