Temporary closures of paths and roads are common in real-world environments, particularly in hiking regions and protected landscapes. However, representing these changes in OpenStreetMap remains challenging. While OSM provides tagging mechanisms such as access restrictions and conditional tags, their use for temporary closures is inconsistent, and their interpretation by routing engines and map applications varies widely.

This talk presents the results of a thesis investigating how temporary closures can be effectively handled within the OSM ecosystem. It introduces a structured approach for modelling different types of closures using existing OSM tags and defines practical decision rules for their application. The talk further examines how these tagging strategies are interpreted by routing engines and demonstrates their impact on routing results under different scenarios.

In addition, the talk presents a prototype workflow for integrating closure information into a dynamically updated mapping service and discusses visualization strategies for communicating closures clearly.

The results provide practical recommendations for improving the representation of temporary closures in OSM and highlight current limitations in handling time-dependent data.