In a recent discussion on the OpenStreetMap talk mailing list around imports in France a point came up again that has been raised a few times: If we had some notion of layers in OSM data, maybe, some tasks such as imports would be easier or could be done in a better way. I want to look into this “layer” issue a little bit.

Yesterday Development Seed/MapBox announced that they received a grant of $575,000 to “improve the core infrastructure of OpenStreetMap”. This is a great development. We do have a lot of problems and there are many things that can be improved. The community has been working on all of these things over the years of course, but I do think that we lag behind the growth curve of OSM and any help is appreciated.

A while ago I wrote a small QGIS plugin, to control a running JOSM or other OSM editor that supports the remote control API from QGIS. I finally got around to add it to the official repository so that you can now install it with a few clicks from inside QGIS.