GoKawiil
Tech News
A how-to guide walks readers through setting up an OpenStreetMap account, installing the JOSM editor, downloading local map data, and filtering it to find shops or amenities missing a website tag. The process guides contributors to add that missing link, a change that then propagates into the many free services built on OSM data.
A new methodology integrates multiple existing data sources—Sentinel-1 radar-based damage detection, Overture Maps building footprints, VIINA territorial control data, and UCDP fatality records—to analyze building destruction across Ukraine from March 2022 to October 2023. The approach disaggregates damage data from 10-meter pixel grids down to individual building level using over 26 million mapped footprints, mostly sourced from Microsoft's ML Building Footprints and OpenStreetMap.
A researcher attended the scientific track of the State of the Map (SotM) conference held August 29-30, marking their first time back at the event since 2011. The academic sessions featured around 20 peer-reviewed papers, a small slice of the more than 1,250 OpenStreetMap-related papers indexed on OpenAlex in 2025 alone. The author also noted receiving a Test of Time award in June from IEEE Pervasive Computing for a 2008 paper on OpenStreetMap.
OpenStreetMap has announced that its annual State of the Map conference will be held in 2026 in Paris, with both in-person and online attendance options. The three-day event will feature talks, workshops and discussion sessions for mappers and users of the open mapping platform.
OpenStreetMap US has designated OldInsuranceMaps.net (OIM), a platform digitizing and georeferencing historic Sanborn Insurance Maps, as one of its Charter Projects. Started by Adam Cox at Louisiana State University in 2022, OIM now hosts over 1,200 Sanborn maps sourced largely from the Library of Congress, supported by a volunteer community of georeferencers.