In the digital age, maps are the invisible scaffolding of our lives. They decide which businesses we find, how we plan city growth and development, and even how aid reaches disaster zones. While most of us default to Google Maps when we’re lost in a new town, there is a quieter, more radical alternative, OpenStreetMap (OSM) powering a whole ecosystem in the background.
OSM is a collaborative project creating a free, editable map of the world. Think of it like Wikipedia, but for geographical data. Users create lines and data points to represent features on the map, and can tag them with a range of useful information - here is a school, there is a cafe, here is a crime hotspot. If it matters to you, you can add it. Developers can then build solutions on top of them to help interested communities to find what matters most to them. Without OSM, we would have few alternatives but to rely on Google maps for all our location based needs. It’s a valuable resource and a fight back against data monopolies.
Why Open Data Matters
Most proprietary maps are ‘black boxes’. If a road is missing or a park is mislabeled on a commercial map, you are at the mercy of a corporation to fix it. This can be a challenge if it’s your business that has been mislabelled! With OSM, the data belongs to everyone. Anyone can add new data, and anyone can edit it.
The biggest benefit of OSM is not that it’s cheap, but that we, the people, control it. No single company can turn off the map or start charging prohibitive licensing fees to use it. School kids can develop OSM solutions alongside giant corporations like Amazon. It’s also feel-good. There are a lot of community and social solutions coming out of OSM projects. Some areas even hold local mapping meet-ups where interested citizens can come along, socialise and learn how to map.
When OSM started, it was also more inclusive. The first places to be digitally mapped were economically valuable geo-locations. For years, areas covered by OSM were simply not covered by other digital maps. Even today, in many parts of the world, particularly in developing nations or rural areas, OSM is actually more detailed than Google Maps because local residents add their own neighborhoods, footpaths, and community landmarks down tracks the mapping vans have never traversed.
Its particular strengths shine when disasters strike. OSM has a dedicated humanitarian group which can mobilise thousands of volunteers. They can map areas affected by the disaster using satellite imagery to details on the OSM database. Within hours, first responders can be provided with life-saving data that simply didn't exist the day before. It’s truly an international digital treasure
Bias in OSM
No dataset is perfectly neutral, and OSM is no exception. Because it relies on volunteers, the map often reflects the demographics of its contributors.
Historically, OSM contributors skewed heavily toward tech-savvy single men. This can result in interest bias. You might find every single craft beer pub or bicycle repair station mapped in Berlin, while childcare centers or women's health clinics in the same area remain invisible. The solution is to get more women involved in mapping.
There are other reasons we get unbalanced representation. Highly populated, tech-heavy cities are mapped down to the individual tree, while remote rural areas may only have primary roads marked. Sometimes, large datasets are dumped into OSM by bots. While this adds scale, it can lead to ghost roads that never existed, or outdated information. The benefit of OSM is that there is usually a human on the ground to verify the data.
A Weekend Project Idea
The great thing about Open Street Maps is that we can all participate. If you're a developer (or an aspiring one), OSM is a playground. Google Maps can get expensive quickly due to API costs, but OSM is free to experiment with.
We are all under pressure to demonstrate our technical skills in practice. OSM can give you a weekend project to demonstrate your skills and you never know - it might take off. You can use tools like Leaflet.js to create a ‘slippy’ map on websites (one that you can scroll and it still stays centered).
You can use tools like Overpass Turbo to interact with OSM data and send specific queries to the OSM data set, respectively. Many features on the OSM map are already tagged and you might easily be able to find all nodes with a key query, just as you would with SQL (e.g. amenity=drinkingwater to find all the public water fountains in an area).
You could build a niche navigator. They are always welcome within certain special interest groups. I can remember in my surfing days, people would pass around hand drawn maps of where the best breaks were at certain times of the year, or in my scuba diving days, we were interested to know where the clearest water could be found. A digital map takes all that away and someone out there shares your passion for information!
Solve a community problem
Some of the best uses of OSM, however, are community based. OSM data has been used to track women’s safety in rural and urban areas. It has been used to distribute leftover food and other resources locally to reduce the burden on working families and those struggling with the cost of living. Open Historic Maps lets you indulge your passion for history, by creating maps as they used to be! It uses open data for important cultural preservation. You can literally make the world a better place through developing data sets.
It is also important for the survival of the planet. Environmentalists can use the dedicated WaterwayMap to ensure that river and stream data is correctly linked up, not just drawn in by an enthusiast. This added layer of validity means that the data can then be used to accurately predict how pollution might travel through our water system, or predict flooding more accurately by predicting downstream flows. The opportunities to build solutions that make a real difference are endless.
The IoA Spring Sprint
OpenStreetMap proves that geography is too important to be left solely to private corporations. It is a living, breathing document of our world. It can be messy and biased, but it belongs to everyone.
This Spring, our IoA student members will be creating their own solutions with OSM data in our bi-annual Student Sprint. If you are an IoA student member, join us! It won’t take up more than a few hours, and it will provide you with tangible evidence for employers that you can put theory into practice. Visit our IoA Student Sprint page to learn more, or if you are already an IoA member, check your emails for your invitation.
