> The area you tried to downlaod is too big or your request was too large.
And no indication whatsoever of how big the area should be, I'm at my fifth attempt so far.
Editing software could be generally aware of high and low density locales and advise accordingly. And it could subdivide a large request into smaller ones. But the JOSM developers prefer to offer a closer-to-the-API experience.
[0] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/API_v0.6#Retrieving_map_...
This seems a bit outdated as many restaurants/shops now consider they FB/insta page as their "official" website (or rather lack of).
[1] https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/keys/contact:facebook [2] https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/keys/contact:instagram
> Determine if any of the search results represent the official website for your place. Do NOT use search results for social media profiles, review sites, or other business aggregators. When in doubt, don’t use it.
This zero-option style of phrasing doesn't leave any room for interpretation.
It's also the place that will allow you to inform your patrons when big tech deletes your heavily invested in social media account for some reason.
Not having a normal website means that potential customers who search for you get hit by login-walls for Instagram and Facebook if they're not on it, or 'you need an app for this' with crap like TikTok. It also makes my (volunteer) job of mapping the area around me harder, because I'm most certainly not going to bother to enter any additional info about your business if I have to go to Instagram or Facebook (and in the OpenStreetMap community I'm not alone in that).
While all of then problems you list are real, small restaurant owners don’t have the time or skills to run a website, having a social media and listing on the maps apps is enough.
If it's something you end up enjoying, one really satisfying thing to do is pick a small rural town and improve the map. With a few hours, it's not hard to make the OSM data more detailed and better than any other publicly available map.
Using JOSM for your 1st edit is definitely not recommended.
Doing the same with iD (the editor embedded in the OSM website) is faster and there's even a tutorial that will explain a bit about how things work.
I mainly chose JOSM for this tutorial because of its filter. As a beginner (just a few weeks ago), I couldn't figure out how to use iD's filter to show JOSM's equivalent of `name=* ((amenity=* "addr:housenumber"=*) | shop=*) -website=* -"contact:website"=*`. For this tutorial I wanted something better than than "click around the map until you find a place without a website." That felt like it'd be a frustrating and inefficient first experience.
Is there a way to make that filter in iD?
I used the web editor recently to add a street and path and to fix some names. It was about as clunky as the Google Maps web editor which I used for the same updates.
Just use the web page. It works, it's not hard to use and it's immediate when you have the urge and motivation to fix something on a map.
So I have a fairly fresh newcomer's perspective and here's what I suggest to get started: keep it simple and start local. As others have noted, skip the complex mapping app and go straight to the website for feature edits, or download a simple mobile app like Every Door and focus on businesses and landmarks near you. Go on a walk around your neighborhood and look for old/incorrect/missing businesses. There may be errors near you about places you actually care about, and it is really gratifying to fix those.
There were restaurants near me that were missing, shops that had changed hands, etc., that were easy fixes but years overdue. I captured some basics (names, posted hours, the phone number posted on the door, etc.) with Every Door, and then later logged into the main OSM website and fine-tuned the entries. I got into a pattern of fixing one or two entries every evening when I went out for a walk and pretty soon my walking route was all up-to-date. Then I started paying attention to things like stop signs and cross walks and found a whole new kind of little, incremental edits that nobody else was doing.
It's been fun, I've made useful contributions, and my laptop is still Java free.
I've considered building a separate app that's similar but oriented around the idea of using voice of pictures to update things (with AI extracting and formatting the data for you to review). But alas making yet another tool isnt ideal.
That would appear to leave me with the choice of just using it for myself (lame) or I then have a public fork to maintain :(
If there's basically no shot of it getting up streamed I think I'd rather make something from scratch to suit my needs without the extras.
Anyway, I hope the AI overlords help us fund more maintainers soon!
My example might be an outlier on the easy side because they have a custom/plugins directory that will not have merge conflicts ever so I try to never modify the main init.lua and keep all of my changes separate in my own files. This prevents merge conflicts.
I can then ask my LLM to add a plugin or customize existing plugins by writing files in this separate directory to add/overwrite plugins and configurations. This works great for me.
If I were working in the main file creating merge conflicts, I could imagine it could get messy fast.
However, UX can also be improved by some simple heuristics that could be seen as mechanistic by the standards of modern LLMs.
Performance and responsiveness, for example, contribute to UX even when the UI remains fixed. I’d wager Fable-level LLMs could improve perf on most open-source GUIs by benchmarking typical use cases and progressively applying standard tricks like caching, buffering, batching network calls.
If someone is a user, they'll have specific complaints. Claude Design is more than capable, which can then be fed directly into Claude Code to implement, test, iterate, and ship.
I agree that it lags behind coding and imo the highest leverage area for Anthropic to invest in. Hopefully they do so; UI is consistently one of the main (severe) differentiators between OSS and paid options.
I got pretty into OSM for a while and that's definitely the thing that eventually put me off... So much stuff has multiple ways to be mapped, and it gets confusing/overwhelming. I understand that OSM has a very malleable data model, and that definitely has many benefits, especially for niche/edge cases. But I do wish the community had arrived at a settled convention for at least the most basic stuff, like the aforementioned sidewalks.
That's less true for niche stuff (vs stuff where two different ideas are in wide use), but there probably isn't all that much of it either.
One way to approach it is to not worry too much about it, consistency can come later.
I do understand that even if does get replaced eventually, it still was useful for a while, and probably served as the basis for whatever came after.
But still. For whatever reason, in my brain, it just diminished whatever psychological reward I got from adding information to OSM, which is a shame.
I believe most consumers of OSM just discard data like buildings and crosswalks and layer on top auto traced data which has 100% coverage.
https://www.justinobeirne.com/google-maps-moat
they have been doing it for years.
I started after one long day of cycling, I ran out of water before I could get home. It was bad. After that, I have been updating OSM with all the water sources I run across. Drinking water in parks, bottle refill stations at stores, water fountains that I run across.
It's not much, but it's honest work.
The larger users of the data are doing some degree of validation of changes before showing them to users.
It was in a place of the world that is unlikely to be popular within the OSM community.
The last time I saw a collection of "biggest objects" for various tags it was mostly things that were just subtly mistagged (e.g., an entire forest being tagged as a single tree) rather than vandalism.
If that forest's dominant tree happens to be a quaking aspen then technically speaking it might not have been mistagged.
This was not because of vandalism, but because of how hard it was to update OSM when you don't do it often and might not look trustworthy. In Danish cities we have a complicated relationship with cars, we don't want them, but we do want the people they bring. One of the obstacles we create is having a lot of one way streets, and when OSM gets an error on those... well... suddenly there is a lot of addresses you simply can't reach. I once updated one of these errors with a photo from the internet, and it was rejected after a few miniutes because I had used an image from the internet which is (was?) against the TOS. Unfortunately the company we bought the API from was not doing any form of validation, so we had a week where our 5000 employess couldn't registerer driving to the most commonly used adress in the neighbouring city. I posted all sorts of documentation proving my official function, and had a discussion with the admins and even though they agreed I was right they refused to let me correct the mistake without real evidence. So eventually I drove my bicycle the 50km to the location, took some pictures and a couple with silly hats and submitted them and got my correction.
Once we had a local copy of the danish map we had no issues. I assume you would do this for any app relying on working routing data.
A foot-carried google street car if you want.
mapillary got bought up by meta.
?
Street view imagery is better for attributes on the actual street - mapillary did it first, with automated feature extraction for street signs etc, others have followed.
If you accidentally did that, I believe there's a way for the admin to scrub that for you.
I have over 2k contributions and most are from the Every Door app ( https://every-door.app/ ) on my phone.
If adding new data is too "scary", then maybe use StreetComplete ( https://streetcomplete.app/ ) which essentially asks questions about missing or existing old data.
I've added buildings, fixed layouts, etc, but that came later, after I better understood how things work.
Crazy stuff, definitely not for beginners
Yes, josm is an ugly java tool but this did not prevent me from doing a lot of mapping back in the days.
Would highly recommend the web editor -- what's proposed here looks super comprehensive but way more difficult to use for a first timer.
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Go_Map!!
(The double exclamation marks in the name drove me away initially, so I tried 3 others first, none of which worked well on the iPhone for my edits, but then "Go Map!!" seemed to just work.)
For edits that can be done from desktop, the OSM official Web site's editor was pretty good -- complicated, but seems to work, and has a nice interactive tutorial mode.
https://every-door.app - intermediate on-the-ground app for smartphones
https://rapideditor.org - AI-assisted mapping in browser
https://www.hotosm.org - task-based mapping in browser
https://josm.openstreetmap.de - advanced editor for desktop (this post)
https://www.comaps.app - actually use the map with ability to make minor changes
https://github.com/streetcomplete/StreetComplete/issues/5421
Street complete has that perfected.
I made a few dozen contributions from my iPhone while out on a walk last week.
Then there is also mapping for humanitarian purposes, https://tasks.hotosm.org/, which has mapping projects prepared by disaster response teams, and you can help by updating maps of areas recently affected by disasters. E.g. recently there was a lot of mapping in the area hit by the August river flood in Nepal.
Soon I thought "This would be easily done by an AI" and searched for it and found META's Rapid (https://rapideditor.org/) which does an ok job finding buildings, but really could go further and suggest the tags as well.
In general it's probably better to see if you can find an official map, and check if its license terms are compatible[1] with OSM.
[1] https://blog.openstreetmap.org/2017/03/17/use-of-cc-by-data/
yes. Click on left circle in top-right, select orange icon ("Places" layer)
Java? No thanks. I don't want that monstrosity of system-hogging, clunk, slow, 1990's UIs on my system again.
Would be interesting to see what involves contributing a real thing that’s not found on the net - a fence, footpath, etc. Or contributing a bus stop.
sorry this is not profesional
2) have you made edit or created a note? Many notes are waiting for years for volunteer to verify them
Now I'm looking into automated edits, because in my region there's a lot of open data published by the government/local cities about locations of various types of features, like bicycle holders or bus stops, and it would be nice to keep that updated automatically.
I'm not sure anyone but me cares, since most people use Google maps. But it's satisfying to have accurate maps for myself at any rate.
We're convinced most users (shopowners too) want to read and write in the same app.
It's not got the best UX, but it does let me edit anything from my phone. This means that I can easily check and/or edit the tags for a path or a track. For example, recently I was on a track that had steps. These weren't on OSM, but I could modify the track on Vespucci to add them. Easier to do on my laptop, but I'd forget to do them by the time I got home.
The other OSM apps, I can recommend but have been mentioned are CoMaps (https://www.comaps.app/) for viewing and route finding and Street Complete for easily updating data. Street Complete (https://streetcomplete.app/) has got a bit more powerful recently as you can now add things like toilets, bins, and benches
It's extremely dev friendly, they have a daily planetary diff you can download and just update your local copy.
A lot of data is missing or is obsolete in the south of France, so I created an account to contribute.
It got banned as spam, so I contacted them to ask what was wrong. A human answered in the following hour and they restored my access immediatly.
They have a better dev experience and support than google.
Teslas on FSD speed through my neighborhood. I noticed the speed limit was incorrect on OSM and updated it several months ago. Teslas are still seemingly ignoring the posted signs. My own Tesla still shows the old speed limit in my neighborhood.
https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/2020/05/12/impacts-project-vor...
The idea that we all have an open map free to use by developers and users not controlled by a rent collecting corporate entity should be wonderful resource for humanity.
The practicalities are often unfortunately far from wonderful:
1. A lot of the POI data in OSM is often either out of date, wrong or incomplete, including names, web addresses, phone numbers, closures, etc.
2. They often don't have addresses as you're supposed to resolve the address from the location, but if you have multi-story buildings this gets problematic.
Part of this I believe is due to the community requirement that this data come from folks walking around vs from providers that say restaurant owners use (square, toast, etc) to manage their online presences.
Google Maps is just dominant in terms of gravity with folks are throwing all their photos and reviews and edits on there. But if google maps had to build google maps on the Places API google itself would be out of business the prices and terms are so out of control.
But even in the more open space you've got:
1. Overture trying to to make OSM actually usable by combining multiple data sources and doing validation. But overture is up to 1 month or more out of date.
2. MapBox and others are trying to make money selling improved POI data on top of OSM derived data with their own sources added.
I ended up building a system that combined OSM (for freshness) plus Overture for reliability plus validation, but no data duplication from google maps to filter bad data coming from OSM and Overture.