2025-11-14 –, Way
In this talk we introduce ohsomeDB - the successor of the OpenStreetMap History Database (OSHDB). ohsomeDB is a scalable distributed Postgres database. It’s powered through PostGIS and Citus and a database schema optimized for OSM data analysis.
The ohsome API has been introduced to the wider OSM community at State of the Map 2018 in Milan. Over the years it has served us well to analyse OSM data quality and mapping history. The OpenStreetMap History Database (OSHDB) was at the core of ohsome right from the beginning. At SOTM EU 2025 we want to say goodbye to OSHDB - and introduce its successor ohsomeDB.
ohsomeDB reviews some of the design decisions we made in the past. First, it’s based on Postgres with PostGIS. We use the Citus extension for partitioning and distribution to improve performance for analytics queries. Our database schema is optimized for OSM (history) data and provides information about changesets metadata. It contains all major and minor OSM element versions including geometry and further attributes (e.g. length, area, centroid, username, valid_from-valid_to timerange and country-code) to facilitate common processing tasks. With ohsomeDB you can analyze completeness, currentness and accuracy of OSM data within a few seconds.
During SOTM EU 2025 we will publish the code for ohsomeDB under an open source license and share our timeline to modernize the ohsome API.
database, full history, data quality, ohsome
Affiliation:HeiGIT
Benjamin Herfort is researcher at HeiGIT and Heidelberg University. In his PhD he has investigated questions of representation and data quality in OpenStreetMap from the perspectives of humanitarian and machine learning-assisted mapping in order to map what is not mapped. In his research and work he is furthermore dealing with the temporal evolution of OpenStreetMap data, MapSwipe and information from social media.
Benjamin works as a product owner at HeiGIT where he is developing open source tools and methods that incorporate geographic information systems for disaster management, humanitarian aid and climate action.