I have been a contributor to the Open Street Map dataset on a very minor level for about 8 years now and I would recomend it to anyone doing research or working in the field of Urban Planning. My initial drive was because I was seeing representations of my area on various websites with quite a lot individual houses missing. I found that annoying! Usually it’s incredibly difficult and time consuming to get even minor corrections on other peoples website not that I would normally even contemplate it but through the power of OpenStreetMap I realised if I added the 3000 houses to OSM I could improve quality on any sites using the derivative dataset – superb! I perform less edits now as the dataset seems so good but on occasion I do go in and edit things like ensuring local business details are correct. The other day I wanted to make an edit so I thought I would write it up.
Getting Started
Editing the global dataset is made supremely easy by online tools. Literally you register at OpenStreetMap’s website LINK , navigate using the map to the location and the either add further information or edit existing information. There may be a cooling off period if you are new if not your edits show up to the entire world in sometimes minutes and usually within a day. I have previously written about how you can use Open Street Map to identify local churches, here I noted an omission and decided to fix the error at source. Craigmillar Community Art Centre used to be a church but the building wasn’t tagged as a church when I went to identify churches in Overpass Turbo (A sister site that allows analysis of OpenStreetMap database) within Edinburgh.
And below is what it looks like when you are making edits – it is extremely intuitive.
5 minutes later I go to Overpass Turbo and rerun the query for churches and it is now in the returned dataset. This allows you to fix issues that are relevant for your purposes and also allows other sponsors and users of Openstreetmap to edit data. This is the true power of open source.
And if you worry about the quality of the individuals contributing to Open Street Map rest assured there is a good representation from very forward looking stable organisations
Who uses Open Street Map