State of the Map 2026
2026.stateofthemap.org
2026.stateofthemap.org
There is something to be said about building tools out of kindness and not for greed. Thank you for your contributions to OSM and Thank you OSM developers too - big fan and user!
I work in public service and I've grotten so many people on board that the map in my region is pretty darned good.
I build and maintain trails for hiking and mountain biking. We build a new trail or change a route and I can just put it in OSM and off it goes into all the other systems. And then I can pull the data back and use it to make maps for planning, signage... whatever.
Google you just give them data, in their format, without all the nice OSS tools that have developed around OSM and... Let them use it. I'm wholly uninterested in contributing to Google, most especially because the barrier to entry is so high.
Lets say you are building a delivery robot. You need not just situational awareness with LiDAR, but also a map for route planning. Will Google give you access for such technology if your innovation is a direct competitor?
If its not a delivery robot, but firefighter robot?
[0] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/05/google-abandons-open-s...
[1] https://wp-events-plugin.com/blog/2018/07/17/google-maps-api...
Keep in mind no changes are made until you commit them using the 'Save' button at the top right of the map area. You also have 'Undo' available. You can also make changes to your line before saving. Right clicking the line or one of the nodes on the line will give additional options (such as being able to continue drawing your line).
Hit 'Save', add a descriptive Changeset Comment and add your source (usually aerial imagery).
If the trail is tree-covered and not visible on the map, you may have used GPS to record the track. In that case you would want to use something like the JOSM desktop editor that has more capability. It can import GPX files, etc.
[0] https://streetcomplete.app
Very satisfying and feels like you're doing something actually useful. Also nudges you to visit parts of your neighborhood you might never have been to before.
Sadly (or, really, amazingly as it’s good to have so many options), another great, major geospatial conference is also happening essentially at the same time: FOSS4G in Hiroshima. They are certainly different conferences but a lot of overlap.
So, in other words it’s a great week to be in geospatial software working on open source and open data.
I used OpenStreetMaps to create a map with a theme that fits the website theme. There were no other free options that I could find to accomplish this goal. Moreover, the map works on just about every browser under the sun. Great work by their team.
Your attribution is hidden by default and it looks like you are doing it on purpose by running `attrib.classList.remove( 'maplibregl-compact-show' );`.
If in the future most Americans do end up saying 'Lake America', `name` could follow that too, and Lake Ontario would end up in `alt_name`.
Or perhaps Americans from the White House to the New York Times to the school curriculum will call it Lake America, but Canadians will stick with Lake Ontario. In that case the top-level local language `name` might end up as 'Lake America/Ontario' (combining all local languages and variants) and `name:en` (English in general, so America would be a minority there) and `name:en-CA` would say Lake Ontario, and `name:en-US` would say Lake America. Time will tell. OpenStreetMap adjusts accordingly.
For the official name there is simply a different tag (`official_name`, or in this case `official_name:en-US` because the lake borders more than one country). Having that available makes it possible to search for it by that name.
e.g. There's a bicycle parking next to the parkside exit at Ueno station, "上野駅公園口自転車駐車場". This is:
meaning: Ueno station park entrance bicycle parking ground in English,
read IRL: ue no eki kouen guchi jitensha chusha jou in Japanese, but written
on the map: shang ye yi gong yuan kou zi zhuan che zhu che chang as Chinese(in Pinyin but I don't know how to type it).
On OpenStreetMap all entities which are named have at the very least the tag `name`. There is no need to specify which language that name is in, because this is geographically determined. For the whole of Japan, `name`-tags are considered to be in Japanese.
This specific bicycle parking has no other names but that one `name` tag, which is the Japanese 上野駅公園口自転車駐車場:
https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/3395310504
This is totally normal. Most named entities only have a local name. A random bicycle parking is not likely to have a name in any other language but the local one. For things which actually have an exonym (like countries and larger cities), you will find additional namespaced language tags like `name:ja` and `name:en`, but a bicycle parking in Japan usually doesn't have an English name (although you can translate the Japanese name).
As for why you are seeing Chinese, that has nothing to do with OpenStreetMap. Some other tool in your chain is doing that (mkgmap?).
The nonsensical reading I posted in the parent comment was what I actually saw in a free map app that uses OSM data. That conversion tool is apparently used for few apps, and it apparently generate English pronunciations whenever "en" resources are missing and bake it into offline map tile files, but uses some Chinese transcription engine for all Kanji/Hanzi names.
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So, I assume this can be solved two ways: someone can define polygons for national borders, at least for all countries that could experience this problem, such as Japan, China, Korea, Vietnam, etc., and use appropriate transcription engines to generate English readings, either at the OSM side or at the conversion tool side. But that's going to define borders for nations, and therefore I assume that there will be some challenges along that borders since everyone have some territorial disputes.
I don't think this has nothing to do with OpenStreetMap; OSM could have tentative autogenerated name or something for location names that could use English transliteration, as one way this problem can be solved, aside whether it's OSM community responsibility to do so; it's extremely high quality community maintained free/libre map, which is already tremendous. Or it could be done at export tool side, following perhaps more natural division of responsibilities. But regardless, as a non-critical longstanding issue, and a matter of fact, there are actually such exported map files out there with Chinese pronunciations baked in.
My response would be the incorrect application amongst the OSM community of sweat-of-the-brow doctrine in copyright law within jurisdictions it very clearly doesn't apply.[2][3]
I hazard a guess some of this incorrect application comes from large companies becoming involved in OSM, and they've signed unrelated enterprise agreements with the likes of Google, or whoever. Within those agreements there may be private agreements that the companies cannot redistribute data of Google (or whoever) without explicit permission. The companies contributing to OSM don't want to have to navigate this problem when they contribute to OSM and would prefer OSM incorrectly applies sweat-of-the-brow doctrine to exclude any non-copyrightable but otherwise "problematic" data (to themselves only) that the likes of Google could possibly argue were obtained through their enterprise agreement.
I also hazard a guess there are numerous OSM community members that strongly hold copy-left views of their contributions. They want/need the sweat-of-the-brow doctrine to be able to control consumers of OSM data (not necessarily just rendered tile maps) as in the example of [5]. In this example, someone complains that a third party brand extracted 100k+ water tap coordinates from OSM and added them to Google Maps.
I also hazard a guess there are some small number of vocal OSM community members that hate "armchair mapping", or want to keep new mappers out of areas they're trying to control, and raising licensing disputes can be a convenient way to encourage such mappers to stay away. If the mapper disputes the claim, it'll probably just fall back to "None of are lawyers so we err on the side of extreme caution". And hence tragedy of the anticommons tends to result.
Some ridiculous examples I've come across:
- Franchise website lists store locations with Google Maps Place IDs only. OSM community members get in a panic because someone opened up every link to determine the address or coordinates of each store, then add store locations to OSM. Somehow they fear a copyright infringement has occurred, even though case law in most major jurisdictions very clearly demonstrates factual data (such as address of a store or coordinates of a store) is not copyrightable.
- Government department publishes some dataset, let's say a shapefile of points of park benches, under a CC-BY licence. They then host public competitions and conferences encouraging people to use the data and create apps and websites based on it. OSM community members panic because the government department hasn't also signed an OSM-specific form or otherwise provided approval that explicitly permits OSM's website to show attribution as just "OSM contributors" with a link to a page that lists the government department amongst 100's of others. As opposed to the bottom of openstreetmap.org having a list of 100,000+ individual contributors. No one stopped to question whether a shapefile of points of park benches could even be copyrightable in the first place. And the government department never responds to a request to clarify how they should be attributed because no one thought of that question when using the CC-BY license.
- Someone on the ground walks past a restaurant with opening hours published on the window and enters them into OSM. Or they visit the restaurant's website to learn what their opening hours are, and enters them into OSM. Oh no! Has there been a copyright infringement?
As far as I'm aware, [4] is probably the most official OSM position resolving some of these sweat-of-the-brow problems. However, other OSM Foundation and Wiki pages are in conflict and would typically scare many community members away from contributing per the examples provided above (e.g. contain strong vague statements such as (paraphrased) "Do not copy features from other maps to OSM"). Additionally, the example of [5] indicates OSM chasing up consumers of OSM data for supposed lack of attribution, and seemingly relying on non-existent (in many jurisdictions) sweat-of-the-brow doctrine to do so.
Copyright law is severley broken with the invention of AI so I guess we'll have to wait and see how jurisdictions change their copyright laws for AI. And then by extension, maybe some of these sweat-of-the-brow ambiguities for mapping/databases may finally be better resolved.
[1] https://2026.stateofthemap.org/sessions/GXXCFE/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweat_of_the_brow
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_of_originality
[4] https://osmfoundation.org/wiki/Licensing_Working_Group/Minut...
[5] https://osmfoundation.org/wiki/Licensing_Working_Group/Minut...
Lots of people did, in fact, consider this.
Though generally official names are the names nobody uses. For example the country labeled "France" also has the attribute "official_name:en": "French Republic"
If they ask what the rules of the game are, they've just lost again.
They didn't invent being deliberately obtuse.
Open Street Map tends to reserve the “name” tag for what things are commonly called by the local community. It appears that for the Lake Ontario and The Gulf of Mexico they’ve added an “official_name:US” tag to capture the names in the executive orders.
Interesting that he changed the name to that of the entire continent, so Mexicans and Venezuelans can feel part of it.
"Britain" is widely used to refer to the UK, but Great Britain is the physical land mass which excludes Northern Ireland, so there is rarely confusion.
Now, I'd love for each geographical region to take their very worst area, and rename it after a certain politician for the lulz.
Doesn't seem to be very clever to me.
Your team is the one who chose to run Harris. Was that clever? Current front runners for 2028 include AOC. Sure to be another banner year for these clever 'Democratic Socialists.'
The fact you didn't even touch the topic but went full MAGA instead, shines a proper light at your original comment now. You just wanted to play the 'ol both sides derailment.
What I didn't understand though was what point you tried to make with "more votes". Yes, a country may have more stupid people vote then non-stupid. It happens all the time. So what?
Both parties let their crackpots take the wheel, with very different results. The cravelnly corrupt buffoonery of Trump is the right-wing result. On the left, their idiots has rendered the party incapable of being taken seriously by grownups -- to an even greater extent than Trump's Republicans. That's the point.
> went full MAGA instead
? I don't support either of the two idiotic "tribes" in our present system, MAGA vs. Woke.
How doesn't it occur to them when they accepted it as a fact? For the second time. Unlike the stupid which up to today tell the story of the "stolen election".
> It doesn't occur to them that whether they're smarter or not, they don't deserve to rule because they do not have the support of the people -- that's the very mathematical basis of any democratic country.
I'm happy that you admit that most of those voters are in fact stupid. I still don't understand though why you would like to be ruled by the kings of stupid. I mean, you've become a joke on this planet. Every leader of stupid creates chaos and harm for everybody besides them (for now). So what are you proud of here exactly?
> You know what I call "A minority of highly-educated self-righteous elites get to pass all the laws to govern those stupid rural dummies"? An aristocracy.
Well, yeah, of course you'd call that because you don't know what the word means but how would you call what Trump does? I mean he literally employs his family...like...you know...in classic aristocratic systems. What do you call this?
> On the left, their idiots has rendered the party incapable of being taken seriously by grownups -- to an even greater extent than Trump's Republicans. That's the point.
So above you just talked down those grown-ups in favour of the stupid. Now grown-ups are the level a ruler needs to reach. So which is it?
You should leave the continent for some time and live somewhere else. You would recognise the damage the stupid have caused to the reputation of the whole country. You'd have to go very far back in history to find a Government so ridiculous as the current one.
I'd say Caligula would be a good candidate. Ludwig II of Bavaria for Trumps first term, where he didn't cause SO much damage.
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:official_name:en-US
"Few if any renderers consume official_name=* or any of its subkeys; in practice, the purpose of this key is for geocoders to find the feature when a user searches for the official name."