Hi friends,

We just went live with one final little feature before Christmas:

Our OSM annotation now returns an additional key note_url which has as its value the URL to add a “note” on the openstreetmap.org site about that location.

You can learn more about OSM Notes over on the OpenStreetMap wiki, but basically it is a way for you to report an error in OpenStreetMap data or to give additional information about the location that can then be validated by a mapper. Notes can be left by anyone, even if your are not a registered OSM contributor, and are a useful tool to help mappers prioritize their efforts.

Here’s an example of the annotation’s syntax (in JSON format):

           "OSM" : {
               "edit_url" : "https://www.openstreetmap.org/edit?way=125838041#map=17/51.95266/7.63247",
               "note_url" : "https://www.openstreetmap.org/note/new#map=17/51.95266/7.63247&layers=N",
               "url" : "https://www.openstreetmap.org/?mlat=51.95266&mlon=7.63247#map=17/51.95266/7.63247"
            },

OSM Notes is one of the many tools the OSM community has developedto help improve data quality. Contributing notes about your local area is also an excellent way to get started with OpenStreetMap. If you’d like to learn more we can highly recommend the site learnosm.org which has a detailed tutorial about OpenStreetMap aimed specifically at beginners. Why not make OpenStreetMap your new hobby in 2020?

Learn more about our annotations over in the API docs

Happy geocoding, and happy holidays,

Ed