this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2025
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Openstreetmap
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Overview:
Discussion on the Openstreetmap service that has the most open map data that began in 2004.
Apps:
JOSM: Map editor
Comaps: Offline maps that's great for walking/hiking/cycling
Magic Earth: Great for driving
Related:
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Oh nice, that's awesome!
Is there a way to access it from within OSM? Or from any OSM-based apps? It's really cool that that exists as a back-end, but it's not especially user-friendly and I imagine it would be a nightmare to try to find and use on a phone. Especially if you don't know the code for the amenity name, since it lacks any autocompletion/suggestion.
"within OSM" – not clear what you are asking for, OSM is just a database of geographical data
"from any OSM-based apps" – most of them should have their own user-friendly search features, I know OsmAnd does, so you can use that.
On the actual OSM website, on the official OSM front-end. https://www.openstreetmap.org/
That, to me, makes it more than "just" a database.
I tried CoMaps, and my search for "bike parking" seems to have worked perfectly...once I figured out the trick to it (which is to ignore all the regular results that come up, and press the small "view on map" icon). Water seemed...less consistent, though that might be because of some weirdness with how things are classified. It led me to notice there seem to be 3 separate ways taps might be labelled...
man_made=water_tap
(as well asman_made=drinking_fountain
),drinking_water=yes
, and (the only one I was previously aware of)amenity=drinking_water
.It's more than a little frustrating that this means that unless every editor is consistently applying all three results, different subsets will turn up on any given search. And this is made worse by OSM's front end, while creating a Point, including "water tap" and "drinking water", depending on what you search for.
edit: wait, I found another related tag.
fountain=bubbler
The openstreetmap.org website has a search feature but I think its abilities to search for kinds of POIs are limited. I never use it for that, only to search for names.
You discovered what I meant in CoMaps. Maybe your experience could be turned into a feature request for it.
Maybe. I think it may actually be more useful for the OSM front end to improve its editor experience though, so what a user entering data is prompted with is more likely to result in consistent data.