Personal blog of Jochen Topf
Whenever I have some time, I keep improving OSM Spyglass . A very useful addition is that Spyglass now shows suggestions for the key and value filter fields. Spyglass gets possible keys/values from the data currently loaded and will show all keys/values matching what you have typed so far. There are many other small improvements in the UI, one is a new menu option in the location control: Switch…
Two years ago or so I started the OSM XRAY project, later I wrote about it in this blog post . Since then I have renamed this project to OSM Spyglass and I have kept working on it on and off. At the State of the Map Europe 2025 in Dundee I gave a talk with the title Everything Everywhere All At Once about this project. You can see the video on Youtube . This got some people excited about the…
Once a year or so I set aside some time to work on taginfo. Then I start working on it and find more and more things that I want to work on and invariably it takes longer than planned. And there is always much more to do that I don t get to. But I did get some interesting things done this time around Tag status OSM wiki pages about keys and tags show a Tag status for many tags. The status is…
Some of the most often seen pages on taginfo are the pages describing a key. To be more specific, the Overview tab on that page. And it has never really looked that great. The layout is strange and a lot of prime screen real estate is wasted. And to make matters worse, the layout totally breaks on small screens: So it was high time we did something about it. The new design is built around fixed…
This blog post is about the new OSM XRAY service. [Update April 2026: This service has since been renamed to Spyglass]. You can find a demo here . It uses vector tiles with all OSM data to really show all of OSM , mostly for debugging. But it is also interesting to just explore what s there. Vector Tiles with ALL Data Every time there is talk about vector tiles of OpenStreetMap data the question…
I have to import a lot of OSM planet files to test things due to my work on osm2pgsql. I have a test machine for that graciously provided by FOSSGIS e.V. , the OSM Foundation local chapter for Germany. A few days ago I imported a planet file and osm2pgsql ran out of memory. I was doing a non-slim import, which means that all node locations and all way nodes are stored in memory. Until recently…
Most OpenStreetMap-based maps you see these days on the Internet are only updated every so often. Some may be updated daily, most are probably only updated every few weeks or months. And that is totally okay for most use cases. But there are some maps that are updated continuously so that changes in the OSM data appear as fast as possible, which is important to motivate OSM contributors and helps…
In osm2pgsql there is that code that stores the raw data it gets from the input files and makes it available to other parts of osm2pgsql for further processing. This code is called, in osm2pgsql-speak, the middle . There are two implementations of this middle , one stores the data in RAM and doesn t support updates. The other stores the data in the database and supports updates. Back in 2020 I…
Taginfo has as its goal to find and collect all useful knowledge about OSM tags and make it accessible. But taginfo can t do everything. That s why it has always linked to tools that do something with OSM tags , the most popular one is probably Overpass Turbo. Taginfo does have maps showing an overview of where certains tags are used, but the maps are static and not available for all tags. The…
About once a year I set aside a week to work on taginfo , one of my many projects that doesn t get enough attention. And inevitably once I get started there are so many things I want to do that it takes two weeks instead of the originally allotted week. So this time I thought I plan with the two weeks from the start. You probably know where this goes: I spend more like three or four weeks on…