We are making our data team’s starter guide Mapping with OpenStreetMap available to anybody under an open CC0 license. Read it to get started mapping, review our mapping best practices or just copy content for your own documentation work. The guide is available in English and in Spanish.
We have created a visually rich guide that allows anyone to understand the core concepts of mapping and start contributing to OpenStreetMap using the advanced JOSM Editor. Our goal was to create documentation tailored for our team to get started mapping quickly and safely while avoiding to duplicate existing work like the OpenStreetMap Map Features documentation. We’re sharing it with everyone as part of our open mapping approach and we hope it may be a useful resource for you too.
Animated GIFs go a long way to illustrate even simple things like how to start editing in JOSM from OpenStreetMap.org.
These mapping guides are part of our public mapping repository and cover an introduction to the OpenStreetMap project, setting up your OpenStreetMap account with JOSM, how to use sources appropriately and diving into hands-on mapping. The content is written with a focus on communicating the core concepts and contains links to in-depth documentation on the OpenStreetMap Wiki throughout.
The guide walks through the best mapping techniques for the most important features on OpenStreetMap. Here’s an animated GIF from how to map buildings.
Give the guide a spin and let us know how it could be improved, and how we can work together with other resources like LearnOSM, MapGive, OpenStreetMap Beginner’s Guide, and HOT Tracing Guides.
Happy power mapping!