Imagico.de

I have been at the State of the Map 2026 conference in Paris, France for the past few days and want to share a few impressions here. I plan to make a separate post about my talk, this is more general commentary. Jardin des Tuileries The OpenStreetMap Foundation I also don’t want to write much about the OpenStreetMap Foundation here. This is partly because i am probably going to make another post about the upcoming OSMF board elections. But also because that part would have been fairly sad and…

Next weekend is going to be the State of the Map 2026 conference in Paris and i am going to present a talk and a poster there. Do maps have a future in OpenStreetMap? The talk is going to be about if maps have a future in OpenStreetMap. If you think that question is silly, first consider what exactly you have in mind when you think about the term map. The talk is going to look at the social history of maps as a means of communication and the central role maps play as a communication platform in…

Another interesting recent topic of discussion in the OSM community has been on corporate influence on the project. The concern about corporate influence on OpenStreetMap is fairly old. For some time there had been substantial concern about a direct takeover of the OpenStreetMap Foundation by large US tech corporations. I had commented on this in the past. But i realize that the focus of that discussion had been somewhat one sided, looking mostly at the influence of individual business…

There is an interesting discussion going on in the OSMF run discourse instance on community.osm.org regarding regulation of use of LLMs in communcation there. First a bit of background The OSMF in 2021 introduced a new behavior control framework for the forum and some mailing lists – which i criticized for its vagueness (and resulting subjectivity in implementation – giving space to cultural bias) and its intolerance towards behavior diversity, both culturally and as a result of neurodiversity.…

Populated places are probably among elements of human geography those you can most widely find represented in maps in general. I here want to discuss a bit the somewhat peculiar situation of their mapping in OpenStreetMap. Populated places on small scale map – Carte de l’Afrique à l’echelle de 1/5M, 1929 Populated places on larger scale map – Survey of India 1:126k Sheet 72C/SW, 1937 First: What is a populated place? Humans throughout history when developing a non-nomadic lifestyle have had the…

English version based on an automatic translation with Deepl. My (almost certainly) final post on the issue of FOSSGIS membership dues. As expected, yesterday’s virtual general meeting of the association approved the increase in dues. The only change adopted compared to the board’s proposal regarding individual memberships is that the reduced fee is no longer intended for members who are not employed, but rather for members whose financial situation requires a reduced membership fee. The…

English version based on an automatic translation with deepl. Another update on the topic of FOSSGIS membership dues – see my previous posts on this topic here, here, and here. The virtual general meeting at which FOSSGIS is going to decide on future membership dues is – as previously reported – scheduled for next Monday. Anyone who is a FOSSGIS member should have received an invitation and login information for the meeting. I have turned my informally outlined proposal into a draft resolution…

I had written about non-locality in tiled rule based map rendering in general some time ago and that post gathered quite a bit of interest – including renewed interest in OSM-Carto development for problems where non-locality is a long known issue. Here i want to continue more in depth on a specific aspect of this. The difficulty of aggregation The specific issue this post is about is the aggregation or merging of geometries in map rendering. As i mentioned in the previous post in the section on…

OpenStreetMap aims to collect world wide local geographic knowledge and create a map by the people for the people. Practically there is, however, a substantial gap between that lofty ideal and the practical reality of mapping. A very good example to illustrate this mismatch between the ideal and reality of OpenStreetMap is animal related infrastructure. Animal husbandry is of enormous economic and social importance in huge parts of the world and accounts for a substantial portion of landuse…

English version based on an automatic translation with deepl. I would like to supplement my previous discussion of FOSSGIS membership fees and, in a follow-up post, the association’s structure with an update on developments within FOSSGIS. As I had previously written, the general meeting in March decided to postpone the decision on membership fees to an extraordinary general meeting, which is scheduled to take place online later this year for the first time on a regular basis (i.e., not as a…

English version based on an automatic translation with deepl. Following the discussion about my post on FOSSGIS membership fees, it has become clear to me that my account – and especially the suggestions I made – are somewhat incomplete. I have quite clearly criticized the fact that, since becoming a local representative of OpenStreetMap in Germany in 2017, the FOSSGIS association has failed to resolve the latent conflict between its role as an advocate for professional developers and users of…

English version based on an automatic translation with deepl. I had actually already decided not to write this blog post – but recent developments have led me to reconsider that decision. However, I’d like to start from the beginning so … Continue reading →

Mapping of surface water is evidently a huge part of recording the physical geography in OpenStreetMap. Water covers two thirds of the planet and is one of the most important resources for human life. I have written quite a bit … Continue reading →

There is another extension available for my Musaicum satellite image product – covering the island of Greenland. Greenland has been in the political news quite a bit in recent months, so it is probably a fitting time to introduce the … Continue reading →

There has been quite a bit of fuss in recent days and weeks about a public consultation of the European Commission regarding an initiative called Towards European open digital ecosystems. While the title does not in any way point towards … Continue reading →