There are many tools that help with quality assurance in OpenStreetMap and they come in many flavours. One popular class of these tools are web sites showing the OSM map in the background and (usually switchable) overlays with markers for different types of problematic OSM data. They usually allow you to jump directly into the OSM editors to fix the problems. The most prominent of these tools are Osmose, the OpenStreetMap Inspector, and KeepRight. But there are many more of these, often written for very specific use cases. All of these tools have the drawback that they are “closed systems”: The person developing the tool and/or running the web service decides which layers there are. The creation of those layers is often tied more or less closely to the tool showing the layers. At the recent Karlsruhe hack weekend I released a new tool, Osmoscope, of that same class, but with much more openness built in.

One key issue of the multilingual map project is obviously how we choose which language labels to render into a map. There are two sides to consider:

While working with OpenStreetMap or other geodata I often stumble upon interesting (or just pretty) visualization of the data. I have started a collection on my web page (Updated 2018-08-10: Originally this linked to a flickr page). Some of these maps were created “on purpose”, some just appeared on my screen by accident. Maybe it inspires someone to create their own whacky visualizations.

More and more boundaries of administrative areas find their way into OpenStreetMap. In some countries there is already quite a lot of data for several levels of government. Unfortunately it is hard to edit and hard to use because relations must be used to model areas in OSM and relations are notoriously difficult to handle. Relations and with it the areas they represent are often broken as a result. Its therefore hard to get a complete set of administrative areas for a particular country and level of government.

It is quite amazing what can be done with good data and current map rendering technology. Mapnik and other renderers have continually pushed the envelope and there are many examples of beautiful maps out there.