Hi everyone,

This month we’re taking a summer break, so no #fridaygeotrivia, our a social media geotrivia contest this month.

We will see you in August. Until then you can practice by reviewing past questions.

Enjoy the summer break.

Ed

Here is an example of the cathedrals of Germany that we created using Matthew’s XofY tool.

1. Can you introduce yourself and tell us a bit about your OpenStreetMap journey? What first got you hooked on mapping?

I started adding parks and playgrounds when my daughter was born. Both as a simple pastime while she napped, but also a way to explore more things to do with her as she got older. Editing the map is a lovely way to learn more about the world.

2. You’ve mentioned using geocoding to turn lists of addresses into mapping adventures, for example tracking down drive in movie theaters. Can you walk us through your “OSM sleuthing” workflow and share some of your favorite discoveries?

For many years I was obsessed with odd things you can find on aerials (ex: jet sprint boat race lakes). Things that aren’t tricky to find, so long as you know, roughly, where to look. Many oddities will have someone keeping track of them with a list of addresses but for OSM, we can do one better! Geocoding with Nominatim or OpenCage makes for a great start to nailing down the exact locations of these things.

3. As a member of the OpenStreetMap US Board, what are your priorities for supporting the community? What opportunities and challenges do you see for OSM in the United States?

We can get further by all rowing in the same direction. Finding places where we can help sort out the common ground between mappers, app developers, imagery providers, educators, etc., is always a huge win. It’s why I’m so proud of the multitude of working groups we have and the great work we support through those groups.

Fundraising is always top of mind as a board member. I would love to be able to hire a few more technical staff and navigating the ever changing landscape of where memberships and grants are coming from continues to be a challenge.

4. A lot of people assume that mapping is just about adding roads or buildings. What are some of the more unusual or niche projects you’ve worked on, and why do those kinds of contributions matter?

I strongly recommend everyone have at least one really niche tag or type of map data that they are super obsessed over. Preferably something super weird. It’s largely all volunteer work so if we’re not having fun then we’re gonna burn ourselves out! We need more things mapped and ALSO more tools, tutorials, and hype videos to help folks stay engaged.

Here’s some things I’ve been obsessive about to help give folks a sense of what I mean:

A map showing school mascots around the world.

I wrote a long tutorial for a JOSM plugin to help add sidewalk coverage.

I got really into learning about nautical beacon tagging and ended up making a whole website to view blinking lights.

I spent a few hours adding Wikidata tagging so folks could sort out the two different competing restaurants named Taco Time.

5. OpenStreetMap is powered by a global community of volunteers. What advice would you give to someone who wants to move beyond simple edits and start exploring, investigating, and contributing in more creative ways?

Honestly, see what other folks are doing. Join us in the OSM US Slack, the OSM World Discord, on the OSM specific Mastodon server, or any of the million other places mappers are meeting up and sharing ideas, insights, and schemes. I am constantly finding new ways of doing things, new tags, new tools, and inspiration from folks in these spaces.

6. OpenStreetMap recently celebrated its 20th anniversary. Looking ahead, where would you like to see the project and its community 20 years from now?

I’m very lucky to be part of a large and long running community group here at OpenStreetMap US. A huge part of the success is having dedicated and consistent staff that can grow in their roles without having to split time paying their bills with other work. I would love to see more local chapters grow and have support staff for local programs, regional outreach, specific tech needs etc. We have a lot of work to still do and the sky is the limit.

Matthew’s journey shows that mapping is about more than documenting what exists. It is a way to explore, learn, and connect with the world around us. His creative approach reminds us that every mapper can bring something unique to OpenStreetMap, whether through a niche interest or a community project. Thank you, Matthew, for sharing your story and for the energy you bring to the OSM community.

Happy mapping

Danielle

Please let us know if your community would like to be part of our interview series here on our blog. If you are or know of someone we should interview, please get in touch, we’re always looking to promote people doing interesting things with open geo data.

I hope you are enjoying the summer.

Today we have a quick note to share that we’ve launched a visual refresh of our GDPR / data protection page.

Specifically:

• The page now has a table of contents for easier browsing.

• We now explicitly list our third-party subprocessors in a table for easier scanning

• We now explicitly list our data deletion schedule in a table for easier scanning

• We now explicitly list the Technical & Organisational Measures (TOMs).

• Clarified that geocoding queries are NEVER used for AI training.

• As with all of our pages, it is now also available in Markdown format (via the “Copy Page” toggle at the top of the content, or appending .makrdownto the URL

• The Change History of the page was getting a bit long (GDPR took effect more than seven years ago!) so it is now hidden behind a clickable toggle.

Just to be clear: there has been absolutely no change in our commitment to and practices around data protection generally and GDPR specifically. This is just a visual update to make the page a bit easier to browse. Just as before, we have no desire or ability to track our customers’ users, and geocoding API users can optionally specify no_record=1 in their API request, in which case we keep no record of their geocoding query.

We continuously roll out tweaks and improvements to improve the privacy and security of our users - for example the recent addition of key obfuscation - and welcome your suggestions of how we could do more.

Happy (private) geocoding,

Ed

following on from our announcement last month of adding postcode to our geosearch / autosuggest widget, I am pleased to report another improvement: our geosearch / autosuggest widget now supports filtering by type of result.

We have added a new field to the geosearch JSON response: _type, just like in our geocoding results, where we list the type of place the result is (for example: city or state or village). In addition we now all you to set the field _type as a parameter to limit results only to certain types (you can specify either a single type or multiple as a comma separated list for example: '_type': 'city,postcode'). You can also exclude specific types by prefacing them with a !, for example: '_type': '!village'. In this way you can fine tune the results for exactly your use case.

One other point - a customer asked if it was possible to specify multiple countrycodes to limit results to not just a single country. This has always been possible but was sadly not documented. Apologies! The geosearch documentation has now been updated to reflect that you can do things like:

`   countrycode: 'de,at,ch,li'

As ever, many thanks to the customers who pushed us to make these improvements. Please keep your feedback coming.

One final note - our geosearch Agent Skill, which you can share with your coding agent to simplify integrating geosearch, has been adjusted accordingly.

Happy geosearching,

Ed

Welcome to the June 2026 edition of #fridaygeotrivia, our social media geotrivia contest.

Traditionally we play on the final Friday of the month, but that is not possible this month, so we will push back by a week to Friday, 3rd of July, 2026, at 17:00 Berlin time, 4pm London time, 11AM New York time.

See how to play below.

The June 2026 geotrivia question:

Name countries where a single river acts as an international border with at least two different neighboring countries. Name the countries and the river.

As an example, 🇨🇭 Switzerland’s border with 🇱🇮 Liechtenstein and 🇦🇹 Austria is the Rhine.

As always:

• Only one answer per toot

• You must include the hashtag #fridaygeotrivia and the emoji flag of the countries

Prizes

#fridaygeotrivia is a game with two prizes:

1. the sheer joy of geographic knowledge and pedantry.

2. the bragging rights of getting the answer first.

The #fridaygeotrivia Mastodon thread:

Post by @opencage@en.osm.town

View on Mastodon

The winner

Once again we have to salute Ciarán Ferrie for winning. Congrats also to Pablo M.U. for second place.

This month’s geotrivia answer:

Show / hide answer

a customer has asked if we could include some additional data in our optional roadinfo annotation, specifically around speed limit data, so we now do that.

Speed limits are much more complicated than you might initially think.

• some types of vehicles have their own speed limits, so we now potentially return maxspeed:bus and maxspeed:hgv (heavy goods vehicles)

• some roads have sign-posted conditional speed limits, which depends on certain situations, such as time of day, day of week, weather, time of year, or another particular condition. This information is now in the field maxspeed:conditional and maxspeed:conditional:hgv

• some roads have digital signs that may display a speed limit in certain situations (weather, traffic, etc). This is now in the field maxspeed:variable

While we were exploring the data we found a few other relevant fields we thought were worth adding to our output

• minspeed - in some countries motorways have a mandatory minimum speed

• tunnel - if the road segment is in a tunnel and potentially the type of tunnel

• tunnel:name - if the tunnel has a name

The new fields and the possible values are, as you would expect, explained in the API docs.

An example:

An API request to those coordinates with the optional parameter roadinfo=1 set will now return

    "roadinfo": {
       "drive_on" : "right",
       "lanes" : 2,
       "maxspeed" : 140,
       "maxspeed:bus" : 80,
       "maxspeed:hgv" : 80,       
       "oneway" : "yes",
       "road" : "Autostrada Wolno\u015bci",
       "road_reference" : "A2",
       "road_reference_intl" : "E 30",
       "road_type" : "motorway",
       "speed_in" : "km/h",
       "surface" : "asphalt",
       "toll" : "yes",
       "toll_details" : {
          "included" : [
             "bus",
             "hgv"
          ]
       }
    }

thus we see that buses and HGVs have a lower speed limit than cars.

As always when discussing road information I need to repeat the key caveat - our road information comes from crowdsourced data sources like OpenStreetMap. It is not in any way “official” or “governmental” data. It may be wrong, incomplete, or out of date. Always drive safely.

Many thanks to the customer that prompted these improvements, and to everyone adding this data to OpenStreetMap.

Happy geocoding,

Ed

The new version of the SDK brings with it some meaningful changes, hence why we bumped to v4.0.0.

Specifically

• Minimum PHP is now 8.2 (was 8.0).

• Guzzle replaces the internal cURL/fopen logic. The SDK now depends on guzzlehttp/guzzle ^7.0, which Composer installs automatically. There is no longer a cURL/fopen fallback and no need to fiddle with allow_url_fopen.

• Dedicated reverse geocoding: new geocodeReverse($latitude, $longitude) method — you no longer have to build a "lat,lng" string yourself.

• Asynchronous requests: new geocodeAsync() and geocodeReverseAsync() methods return a Guzzle PromiseInterface, allowing concurrent geocoding.

• Type declarations everywhere. All method parameters and return values are now typed. In particular geocode() always returns an array or throws an \Exception — it no longer returns null/false (see Handling the Response below).

• Network failures are reported with a synthetic status.code of 498 instead of failing silently; the API key is redacted from the message.

Further Reading

• OpenCage PHP tutorial
• opencage/geocode on Packagist
• Source code (v4.0.0)
• Guzzle documentation

Final Points

As with all of the 40+ SDKs for our geocoding API we welcome your ideas for improvement. We are continually rolling out various fixes and improvements in the future, but code contributions are of course also gladly received.

Our geocoding Agent Skill, which includes a reference file for working with PHP, has been adjusted accordingly.

Happy geocoding (whether in PHP or other languages),

Ed

with the rise of coding agents, use of the command line has grown significantly.

We have offered a command line (CLI) geocoding tool for years, but until now it has been bundled with our python SDK. As the pace of development on the command line tool increased and the use case increasingly divered from the python SDK, we have now decided to split the CLI tool into its own repository and python package.

What do you need to do?

Going forward if you want to use the CLI you will need to install the python package opencage-cli.

This is of course explained on our CLI geocoding tutorial. The actual commands and syntax used on the command line remain the same.

Closing points

Our geocoding Agent Skill has been adjusted accordingly.

If command line isn’t your cup of tea, don’t worry, we have geocoding SDKs for over 40 programming languages and frameworks.

Happy geocoding, from the command line or elsewhere

Ed

1. Who are you and what do you do? What got you into OpenStreetMap?

I am Omran Najjar. I recently started identifying as a humanitarian and development technologist as I have spent the last 12 years working in humanitarian and development organizations and using my technological skills to achieve those organizations’ goals.

I was working on a project that needed geocoding with Plan International back in 2020 and I needed a background map and this project led me to OSM. That was the start, later I joined the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team in 2021 and got more and more involved in mapping and geo technologies.

2. What would you say is the current state of OSM and the OSM community in Syria?

Until December 2024, I avoided the OSM map and community in Syria. I sneaked a look on the map frequently but it was nostalgia as someone who was forced to leave his country. The Turkey/Syria earthquake in 2023 triggered a lot of trauma since my family was in the south of Turkey in the affected region and from daily work life, humanitarian mapping activation started.

After December 2024, the fall of the dictator instilled greater hope for the country’s future, so we started more organized efforts to direct the Syria OSM community activities, as the country has suffered massive destruction and corruption, and the trend seems to have at least stopped deteriorating.

As of 27 May 2026, we had over 200 registered OSM community members and more than 20 active mappers. The map itself had many outdated features and minimum details even in the capital city and other urban areas.

3. What are the unique challenges and pleasures of OpenStreetMap in Syria? What aspects of the projects should the rest of the world be aware of?

I noticed weak internet connectivity and accessibility, or perhaps I’ve grown accustomed to good internet connection as I am living in the EU. When I visited the country it felt lovely to detox from notifications and other messages because many services are blocked. Slack and some Google services are not operational within the country due to technological sanctions from the US and EU. Some of those have been lifted, but the technology has not yet fully recovered.

A great pleasure was seeing the collective impressions Syrians had after what we now call Liberation Day on 8 December 2024, and how this has been reflected in the OSM map and community. In the registration form, we asked volunteers to locate themselves on a map and it turned out to be a piece of art.

4. Can you share a specific example where OpenStreetMap data has made a real difference in Syria, such as humanitarian response, navigation, or local decision making, and what is still missing in the map today that would have the biggest impact?

The country closed its doors to the international community for at least 14 years of war and for over 50 years of the same party ruling the country, passed from a father to his son. Therefore, fewer people needed navigation systems, there has always been less coverage for GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System) as GPS and others. In the last year, increased international visitors and free movement within the country have led to higher interest in navigation systems and more accurate road networks.

My city’s local council (Douma in rural Damascus) has raised the concern about needing a detailed map for the city and have been conducting GIS training and aim to map the city in detail and OSM is a big part of those efforts.

5. What is the best way to get involved? Are there regular meetups, or a place the community chats online?

We have a registration form We are mainly communicating by email, we have a Telegram channel as well and all of those details are always documented in a collective shared document. We are documenting our meetings and other activities. It is mostly in Arabic though.

6. What steps could the global OpenStreetMap community take to help support OSM in Syria?

We have created a couple of mapping projects on HOT Tasking Manager

It turned out the OSM Syria community is not large enough; support from the global community for high-quality data and validation is welcome.

7. OpenStreetMap recently celebrated 20 years. Where do you see the project in another 20 years?

I have sensed some automatic rejection from the OSM community in general against AI, and I do understand that, especially when AI is treated as a black box and feels like it is integrated into everything without careful review (community review). Maybe OSM will become the open source world’s digital twin with community and AI collaboration!

We’d like to thank Omran for generously sharing his time and insights with us. We also want to acknowledge the difficult circumstances he has experienced, including the war in Syria and the devastating earthquake, and the impact these events have had on his family and community.

The views and experiences shared in this interview are those of the interviewee and do not necessarily reflect the views of OpenCage or the wider OpenStreetMap community.

Danielle

Please let us know if your community would like to be part of our interview series here on our blog. If you are or know of someone we should interview, please get in touch, we’re always looking to promote people doing interesting things with open geo data.

a quick post to announce it will be my pleasure to speak at the first ever Geomob Dublin on Wednesday of this week (June 3rd).

I will give a version of my The Joy of Geocoding talk, that I also gave a few months ago in Cologne. Huge thanks to Jenny Allen and Dermot McNally for taking the lead on bringing Geomob to Dublin. I am looking forward to the other talks and meeting everyone from the local geo scene. Ihave no doubt this will be the first of many interesting events, and if you are in Dubline I encourage you to come along.

If you can’t make it to Dublin, perhaps you can join us for another Geomob Berlin on the 18th, and our friends in Belgium are organizing an event in Brussels on the 23rd.

So as you can see Geomob is thriving. But if don’t happen to be in any of those cities there is also the weekly Geomob podcast, where we discuss topics from across the whole spectrum of geospatial.

I hope to see you at a Geomob event soon, be it in Dublin or elsewhere!

Ed