OpenStreetMap

OpenStreetMap (OSM) is a collaborative map database of the world maintained by a community of volunteers through open collaboration, launched on 9 August 2004 by Steve Coast and hosted by the UK-based OpenStreetMap Foundation^[1][2][3].

Contributors collect data via ground surveys, GPS traces, tracing of aerial and satellite imagery, and imports of freely licensed geodata, storing features as nodes, ways, and relations under the Open Database License^[2]. The project counts 10.6 million registered users and its data underpins navigation products, humanitarian mapping, and geospatial analysis worldwide^[2].

What It Does

OpenStreetMap collects data about stationary objects worldwide, including infrastructure, points of interest, land use and cover, and topography, at scales ranging from international boundaries to individual shops and street furniture^[2]. Its website serves as an online map, a geodata search engine, and a browser-based editing tool, with routing powered by engines such as OSRM, GraphHopper, and Valhalla^[1][2].

Data And Methodology

The data model is a topological structure built from three primitives: nodes (points in WGS 84 coordinates), ways (ordered node lists forming lines or polygons), and relations (groups of members with roles), each described by free-form key-value tags managed as a folksonomy^[2]. Data come from volunteer surveys, personal knowledge, imagery tracing from providers such as Maxar, Bing, Esri, and Mapbox, street-level imagery from Mapillary and KartaView, and imports of government data such as the U.S. Census TIGER road dataset^[2].

Delivery And Pricing

The project publishes full "planet" database dumps at minutely and weekly intervals in XML and Protocol Buffers formats, and third parties such as Geofabrik publish country and regional extracts in OSM and shapefile formats; Amazon Web Services hosts the planet file on S3 for query services^[2]. Meta published a QA-enhanced Daylight Map Distribution from 2020 to 2024, and OSM data forms a major part of the Overture Maps Foundation dataset and of commercial products from Mapbox and MapTiler^[2]. Everything is free under the ODbL, with attribution to "©OpenStreetMap contributors" required^[1][2].

History

Steve Coast founded OSM in 2004 at University College London in response to the Ordnance Survey's refusal to release its data under free licences; the first contribution was a London street mapped by GPS in December 2004^[2]. The OpenStreetMap Foundation was established in April 2006, and early growth came from donations such as a complete Netherlands road dataset from AND (2007) and the TIGER import completed in October 2007^[2].

Google Maps' 2012 introduction of pricing accelerated adoption: Foursquare and Craigslist switched to OpenStreetMap, and Apple launched a mapping platform using TomTom and OpenStreetMap data^[2]. As of 2025, TomTom, Microsoft, Esri, and Meta are the highest-tier corporate sponsors of the OpenStreetMap Foundation, which is funded mostly via donations^[2].

Buyers And Use Cases

OSM data is used for cartography, geolocation, geospatial analysis, turn-by-turn navigation, humanitarian aid, and gaming^[2]. Quality studies cited by Wikipedia include a 2011 German comparison in which OSM held 27% more information than TomTom for the full street network, 2021 estimates of 88% and 82% shop-data completeness in Baden-Württemberg and Saxony, and a 2024 finding that OSM offers the most detailed public coverage of the European high-voltage grid^[2]. For alternative data, its building, road, and points-of-interest layers feed location intelligence and retail-coverage models, complementing satellite sources such as NASA Earthdata.

Licensing And Governance

All contributions must be compatible with the Open Database License; the project relicensed from CC BY-SA to ODbL in September 2012, retaining more than 99% of data, and dissenting mappers created the FOSM fork under the old licence^[2]. The OpenStreetMap Foundation, a nonprofit registered in England and Wales, hosts the database; website hosting is supported by Fastly and OSMF corporate members^[1][2].