Steve Coast founded the project in 2004 while at a university in Britain, initially focusing on mapping the United Kingdom.^[3] In the UK and elsewhere, government-run and tax-funded projects like the Ordnance Survey created massive datasets but declined to freely and widely distribute them. The first contribution was made in London in 2005.^{[4][non-primary source needed]} In April 2006, the OpenStreetMap Foundation was established to encourage the growth, development and distribution of free geospatial data and provide geospatial data for anybody to use and share.

In April 2007, Automotive Navigation Data (AND) donated a complete road data set for the Netherlands and trunk road data for India and China to the project.^[5] By July 2007, when the first "The State of the Map" (SotM) conference^[6] was held, there were 9,000 registered users. In October 2007, OpenStreetMap completed the import of a US Census TIGER road dataset.^[7] In December 2007, Oxford University became the first major organisation to use OpenStreetMap data on their main website.^[8] Ways to import and export data have continued to grow – by 2008, the project developed tools to export OpenStreetMap data to power portable GPS units, replacing their existing proprietary and out-of-date maps.^[9] In March 2008, two founders of CloudMade, a commercial company that uses OpenStreetMap data, announced that they had received venture capital funding of €2.4 million.^[10] In 2010, AOL launched an OSM-based version of MapQuest and committed $1 million to increasing OSM's coverage of local communities for its Patch website.^[11]

Yahoo! (2006–2011),^[12][13] Bing (2010 – till date),^[14] and DigitalGlobe (2017^[15]–2023^[16]) allowed their aerial photography, satellite imagery to be used as a backdrop for map production. For a period from 2009 to 2011, NearMap Pty Ltd made their high-resolution PhotoMaps (of major Australian cities, plus some rural Australian areas) available under a CC BY-SA licence.^[17]

In 2012, the launch of pricing for Google Maps led several prominent websites to switch from their service to OpenStreetMap and other competitors.^[18] Chief among these were Foursquare and Craigslist, which adopted OpenStreetMap, and Apple, which ended a contract with Google and launched a self-built mapping platform using TomTom and OpenStreetMap data.^[19]

OpenStreetMap uses a topological data structure, with four core elements (also known as data primitives):

• Nodes are points with a geographic position, stored as coordinates (pairs of a latitude and a longitude) according to WGS 84. Outside of their usage in ways, they are used to represent map features without a size, such as points of interest or mountain peaks.^[20]
• Ways are ordered lists of nodes, representing a polyline, or possibly a polygon if they form a closed loop. They are used both for representing linear features such as streets and rivers, and areas, like forests, parks, parking areas and lakes.^[20]

• Relations are ordered lists of nodes, ways and relations (together called "members"), where each member can optionally have a "role" (a string). Relations are used for representing the relationship of existing nodes and ways. Examples include turn restrictions on roads, routes that span several existing ways (for instance, a long-distance motorway), and areas with holes.^[20]
• Tags are key-value pairs (both arbitrary strings). They are used to store metadata about the map objects (such as their type, their name and their physical properties). Tags are not freestanding, but are always attached to an object: to a node, a way or a relation.^[20] A recommended ontology of map features (the meaning of tags) is maintained on a wiki. New tagging schemes can always be proposed by a popular vote of a written proposal in OpenStreetMap wiki, however, there is no requirement to follow this process. There are over 89 million different kinds of tags in use as of June 2017.^[21]

The OpenStreetMap data primitives are stored and processed in different formats. OpenStreetMap server uses PostgreSQL database, with one table for each data primitive, with individual objects stored as rows.^[22][23] From this, several database dumps are created, which are available for download. The complete dump is called planet.osm. These dumps exist in two formats, one using XML and one using the Protocol Buffer Binary Format (PBF).^{[citation needed]}

OpenStreetMap data and derived tiles were originally published under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike licence (CC BY-SA) with the intention of promoting free use and redistribution of the data.

In September 2012, the licence was changed to the Open Database Licence (ODbL) published by Open Data Commons (ODC) in order to define its bearing on data rather than representation more specifically.^[24][25] As part of this relicensing process, some of the map data was removed from the public distribution. This included all data contributed by members that did not agree to the new licensing terms, as well as all subsequent edits to those affected objects. It also included any data contributed based on input data that was not compatible with the new terms.

Estimates suggested that over 97% of data would be retained globally, but certain regions would be affected more than others, such as in Australia where 24 to 84% of objects would be retained, depending on the type of object.^[26] Ultimately, more than 99% of the data was retained, with Australia and Poland being the countries most severely affected by the change.^[27] The license change and resulting deletions prompted a group of dissenting mappers to establish Free Open Street Map (FOSM), a fork of OSM that remained under the previous license.^[28]

All data added to the project needs to have a licence compatible with the Open Database Licence. This can include out-of-copyright information, public domain or other licences. Software used in the production and presentation of OpenStreetMap data may have separate licensing terms.

Map tiles provided by the OpenStreetMap project were licensed under CC-BY-SA-2.0 until 1 August 2020. The ODbL license requires attribution to be attached to maps produced from OpenStreetMap data, but does not require that any particular license be applied to those maps. "©OpenStreetMap Contributors" with link to ODbL copyright page as attribution requirement is used on the site.^[29]

OpenStreetMap data has been favourably compared with proprietary datasources,^[30] although as of 2009^[update] data quality varied across the world.^[31][32] A study in 2011 compared OSM data with TomTom for Germany. For car navigation TomTom has 9% more information, while for the entire street network, OSM has 27% more information.^[33] In 2011, TriMet, which serves the Portland, Oregon, metropolitan area, found that OSM's street data, consumed through the routing engine OpenTripPlanner and the search engine Apache Solr, yields better results than analogous GIS datasets managed by local government agencies.^[34] A 2021 study compared the OpenStreetMap Carto style's symbology to that of the Soviet Union's comprehensive military mapping programme, finding that OSM matched the Soviet maps in coverage of some features such as road infrastructure but gave less prominence to the natural environment.^[35]

Map data is collected by ground survey, personal knowledge, digitizing from imagery, and government data. Ground survey data is collected by volunteers traditionally using tools such as a handheld GPS unit, a notebook, digital camera and voice recorder.

Software applications on smartphones (mobile devices) have made it easy for anybody to survey. The data is then entered into the OpenStreetMap database using a number of software tools including JOSM and Merkaator.^[36]

Mapathon competition events are also held by local OpenStreetMap teams and by non-profit organisations and local governments to map a particular area.

The availability of aerial photography and other data from commercial and government sources has added important sources of data for manual editing and automated imports. Special processes are in place to handle automated imports and avoid legal and technical problems.

Ground surveys are performed by a mapper, on foot, bicycle, or in a car, motorcycle, or boat. Map data is typically recorded on a GPS unit or on a smart phone with mapping app; a common file format is GPX.

Once the data has been collected, it is entered into the database by uploading it onto the project's website together with appropriate attribute data. As collecting and uploading data may be separated from editing objects, contribution to the project is possible without using a GPS unit, such as by using paper mapping.

Similar to users contributing data using a GPS unit, corporations (e.g. Amazon) with large vehicle fleets may use telemetry data from the vehicles to contribute data to OpenStreetMap.^[37]

Some committed contributors adopt the task of mapping whole towns and cities, or organising mapping parties to gather the support of others to complete a map area.

A large number of less-active users contributes corrections and small additions to the map.^{[citation needed]}

Maxar,^[15] Bing,^[14] ESRI, and Mapbox are some of the providers of aerial/satellite imagery which are used as a backdrop for map production.

Data from several street-level image platforms are available as map data photo overlays. Bing Streetside 360° image tracks, and the open and crowdsourced Mapillary and KartaView platforms provide generally smartphone and dashcam images. Additionally, a Mapillary traffic sign data layer, a product of user-submitted images is also available.^[38]

Some government agencies have released official data on appropriate licences. This includes the United States, where works of the federal government are placed under public domain. In the United States, most roads originate from TIGER from the Census Bureau.^[39] Geographic names were initially sourced from Geographic Names Information System, and some areas contain water features from the National Hydrography Dataset. In the UK, some Ordnance Survey OpenData is imported. In Canada Natural Resources Canada's CanVec vector data and GeoBase provide landcover and streets.^{[citation needed]}

Globally, OpenStreetMap initially used the prototype global shoreline from NOAA. Due to it being oversimplified and crude, it has been mainly replaced by other government sources or manual tracing.^{[citation needed]}

Out-of-copyright maps can be good sources of information about features that do not change frequently. Copyright periods vary, but in the UK Crown copyright expires after 50 years and hence old Ordnance Survey maps can legally be used. A complete set of UK 1 inch/mile maps from the late 1940s and early 1950s has been collected, scanned, and is available online as a resource for contributors.^[40]

The map data can be edited from a number of editing applications that provide aids including satellite and aerial imagery, street-level imagery, GPS traces, and photo and voice annotations.

By default, the official OSM website directs contributors to the Web-based iD editor.^[41][42] Meta develops a fork of this editor, Rapid, that provides access to external datasets, including some derived from machine learning detections.^[43] For complex or large-scale changes, experienced users often turn to more powerful desktop editing applications such as JOSM, Potlatch, Merkaartor, and, with an extension, ArcGIS.^[44]

Several mobile applications also edit OSM. Go Map!! and Vespucci are the primary full-featured editors for iOS and Android, respectively. StreetComplete is an Android application designed for laypeople around a guided question-and-answer format. Every Door, Maps.me, Organic Maps, and OsmAnd include basic functionality for editing points of interest.

Between 2018 and 2023, the top five editing tools for contributions were JOSM, iD, StreetComplete, Rapid, and Potlatch.^[45]

As a fully crowdsourced project, OSM accepts contributions from the general public without any conditions. Changesets submitted through editors and the OSM API immediately enter the database and are quickly published for reuse, without going through peer review beforehand. The API only validates changes for basic well-formedness, but not for topological or logical consistency or for adherence to community norms. Community members detect and fix unintentional errors and vandalism after the fact by monitoring the slippy map and revision history on the main website, as well as by searching for issues using tools like OSMCha, OSM Inspector, and Osmose.

The project has a geographically diverse user-base, due to emphasis of local knowledge and "on-the-ground" situation in the process of data collection.^[46] Many early contributors were cyclists who survey with and for bicyclists, charting cycleroutes and navigable trails.^[47] Others are GIS professionals. Contributors are predominately men, with only 3–5% being women.^[48]

By August 2008, shortly after the second The State of the Map conference was held, there were over 50,000 registered contributors; by March 2009, there were 100,000 and by the end of 2009 the figure was nearly 200,000. In April 2012, OpenStreetMap cleared 600,000 registered contributors.^[49] On 6 January 2013, OpenStreetMap reached one million registered users.^[50] Around 30% of users have contributed at least one point to the OpenStreetMap database.^[51][52]

As per a study conducted in 2011, only 38% of members carried out at least one edit and only 5% of members created more than 1000 nodes. Most members are in Europe (72%).^[53] According to another study, when a competing maps platform is launched, OSM attracts fewer new contributors and pre-existing contributors increase their level of contribution possibly driven by their ideological attachment to the platform. Overall, there is a negative effect on the quantum of contributions.^[54]

Some companies freely license satellite/aerial/street imagery sources from which OpenStreetMap contributors trace roads and features, while other companies make data available for importing map data. Automotive Navigation Data (AND) provided a complete road data set for Netherlands and trunk roads data for China and India. In June 2018, the Microsoft Bing team announced contribution of 125 million U.S. building footprints to the project – four times the number contributed by users and government data imports.^[55] Amazon Logistics uses OpenStreetMap for navigation and has a team which revises the map based on GPS traces and feedback from its drivers.^[56] As of February 2021, Apple was the most prolific corporate editor, responsible for 80% of edits to existing roads.^[56]

According to a study, nearly 17% of all edits to the map came from corporate teams during 2019–2020. The top 13 corporate contributors during 2014–2020 include Apple, Kaart, Amazon, Facebook, Mapbox, Digital Egypt, Grab, Microsoft, Telenav, Developmentseed, Uber, Lightcyphers and Lyft.^[56] There was some vandalism on some occasions attributed to corporate editors.^[57][58]

Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) is a nonprofit organisation promoting community mapping across the world. It developed the open source HOT Tasking Manager for collaboration, and contributed to mapping efforts after the April 2015 Nepal earthquake, the 2016 Kumamoto earthquakes, and the 2016 Ecuador earthquake. The Missing Maps Project, founded by the American Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders, and other NGOs, uses HOT Tasking Manager. The University of Heidelberg hosts the Disastermappers Project for training university students in mapping for humanitarian purposes. When Ebola broke out in 2014, the volunteers mapped 100,000 buildings and hundreds of miles of roads in Guinea in just five days.^[59]

Since 2007, the OpenStreetMap community has held an annual, international conference called State of the Map (SotM) where all stake holders gather to share progress and discuss issues.^[6] There are also various national, regional and continental SotM conferences, such as SotM U.S., SotM Baltics, SotM Asia & SotM Africa.

The official OSM website at openstreetmap.org is the project's main hub for contributors. A reference implementation of a slippy map (featuring a selection of third-party tile layers), a revision log, and integrations with basic geocoders and route planners facilitate the community's management of the database contents. Logged-in users can access an embedded copy of the iD editor and shortcuts for desktop editors for contributing to the database, as well as some rudimentary social networking features such as user profiles and diaries. The website's built-in REST API and OAuth authentication enable third-party applications to programmatically interact with the site's major functionality, including submitting changes. Much of the website runs as a Ruby on Rails application backed by a PostgreSQL database.

OSM publishes official database dumps of the entire "planet" for reuse on minutely and weekly intervals. Alternative third-party distributions provide access to OSM data in other formats or to more manageable subsets of the data. Geofabrik publishes extracts of the database in OSM and shapefile formats for individual countries and political subdivisions. As part of the QLever project, the University of Freiburg publishes Turtle dumps suitable for linked data systems. From 2020 to 2024, Meta published the Daylight Map Distribution, which applied quality assurance processes and added some external datasets to OSM data to make it more production-ready.^[60]

A variety of applications and services allow users to visualise OSM data in the form of a map. The official OSM website features an interactive slippy map interface so that users can efficiently edit maps and view changesets. It presents the general-purpose OpenStreetMap Carto style alongside a selection of specialised styles for cycling and public transport. Beyond this reference implementation, community-maintained map applications focus on alternative cartographic representations and specialised use cases. For example, OpenRailwayMap is a detailed online map of the world's railway infrastructure based on OSM data.^[61] OpenSeaMap is a world nautical chart built as a mashup of OpenStreetMap, crowdsourced water depth tracks, and third-party weather and bathymetric data. OpenTopoMap uses OSM and SRTM data to create topographic maps.^[62] On the desktop, applications such as GNOME Maps and Marble provide their own interactive styles, and GIS suites such as QGIS allow users to produce their own custom maps based on the same data.

Two kinds of software stacks have emerged for rendering OSM data as a slippy map. In one, a server-side rendering engine such as Mapnik prerenders the data as a series of raster image tiles, then serves them using a library such as mod_tile. A library such as OpenLayers or Leaflet displays these tiles on the client side on the slippy map. Alternatively, a server application converts raw OSM data into vector tiles according to a schema, such as Mapbox Streets, OpenMapTiles, or Shortbread. These tiles are rendered on the client side by a library such as the Mapbox Maps SDK, MapLibre, Mapzen's Tangrams, or OpenLayers. Applications such as Mapbox Studio allow designers to author vector styles in an interactive, visual environment.^[63] Vector maps are especially common among three-dimensional mapping applications and mobile applications.

Many commercial and noncommercial websites feature maps powered by OSM data in locator maps, store locators, infographics, story maps, and other mashups. Locator maps on Wikipedia and Wikivoyage articles for cities and points of interest are powered by a MediaWiki extension and the OSM-based Wikimedia Maps service.^[64] The locator maps on Craigslist,^[65] Facebook,^[66], Flickr,^[67] Foursquare City Guide,^[68] Gurtam's Wialon,^[69] and Snapchat^[70] are also powered by OSM.

In 2012, Apple quietly switched the locator map in iPhoto from Google Maps to OSM.^[71] Webots uses OSM data to simulate realistic surroundings for autonomous vehicles.^[72] Interactive OSM-based maps appear in many mobile navigation applications, fitness applications, and augmented reality games, such as Strava.^[73]

A geocoder indexes map data so that users can search it by name and address (geocoding) or look up an address based on a given coordinate pair (reverse geocoding). Several geocoders are designed to index OSM data, including Nominatim (from the Latin, 'by name'), which is built into the official OSM website along with GeoNames.^[74][75] Komoot's Photon search engine provides incremental search functionality based on a Nominatim database. Element 84's natural language geocoder uses a large language model to identify OSM geometries to return.^[76]

The Overpass API searches the OSM database for features whose metadata or topology match criteria specified in a structured query language.^[77] QLever is a triplestore that accepts standard SPARQL queries to return facts about the OSM database. Heidelberg University has developed a geographic information retrieval system that answers natural language queries based on OSM data.^[78]

OSM data is used in scientific studies. For example, road data was used for research of remaining roadless areas^[79] and in the creation of the annual Forest Landscape Integrity Index.^[80]

A variety of route planning libraries and services are based on OpenStreetMap data. OpenStreetMap's official website has featured GraphHopper, the Open Source Routing Machine, and Valhalla since February 2015.^[81][82]

Mobile applications such as CycleStreets, Komoot,^[83] Locus Map, Maps.me, Organic Maps, and OsmAnd also provide offline route planning capabilities. Apple Maps uses OSM data in many countries.^[84] Some of Garmin's GPS products incorporate OSM data.^[85] Geotab^[86] and TeleNav^[87] also use OSM data in their in-car navigation systems.

Wheelmap.org is a portal for discovering wheelchair-accessible places, mashing up OSM data with a separate, crowdsourced customer review database.

Some public transportation providers rely on OpenStreetMap data in their route planning services and for other analysis needs.

OSM data appears in the driver or rider application or powers backend operations for ridesharing companies such as Grab.^[88]

In 2019, owners of Tesla cars found that the Smart Summon automatic valet parking feature within Tesla Autopilot relied on OSM's coverage of parking lot details.^[89]

The 2010 Haiti earthquake established a model for non-governmental organisations (NGOs) to collaborate with international organisations. OpenStreetMap and Crisis Commons volunteers used available satellite imagery to map the roads, buildings and refugee camps of Port-au-Prince in just two days, building "the most complete digital map of Haiti's roads".^[91][92] The resulting data and maps have been used by several organisations providing relief aid, such as the World Bank, the European Commission Joint Research Centre, the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, UNOSAT and others.^[93]

After Haiti, the OpenStreetMap community continued mapping to support humanitarian organisations for various crises and disasters. After the Northern Mali conflict (January 2013), Typhoon Haiyan^[94][95] in the Philippines (November 2013), and the Ebola virus epidemic in West Africa (March 2014), the OpenStreetMap community in association with the NGO Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) has shown it can play a significant role in supporting humanitarian organisations.^[59]

Game developer users include Ballardia (World of the Living Dead: Resurrection),^[96] Niantic (Ingress, Pokémon Go),^[97][98] Hasbro (Monopoly City Streets),^[99][100] and Jutsu Games (Infection Free Zone).

OSM and projects based on it have been recognized for their contributions to design and the public good:

• In 2018, the Swiss Society of Cartography awarded the OSM-based OpenMapTiles project its Prix Carto award for digital cartography.^[101]
• In 2019, the Free Software Foundation awarded OSM the 2018 Free Software Award for Projects of Social Benefit.^[102]
• In 2021, Stamen Design's OSM-based tile layer Watercolor (2010) became the first live website to enter the permanent collection of the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.^[103]
• In 2023, the Digital Public Goods Alliance, a United Nations–endorsed initiative, recognized OSM as a digital public good for its contribution toward the UN's Sustainable Development Goals.^[104]

A 2020 research report by Accenture estimated the total replacement value of the OSM database, the value of OSM software development effort, and maintenance overhead at $1.67 billion,^[105] roughly equivalent to the value of the Linux kernel in 2008.^[106] Several startups have turned OSM-based software as a service into a business model, including Carto, Mapbox, MapTiler, and Mapzen. The Overture Maps Foundation incorporates OSM data in some of its GIS layers.^[107]

Several open collaborative mapping projects are modeled after OSM and rely on OSM software. OpenHistoricalMap is a world historical map that accepts geodata about the past. OpenGeofiction focuses on fantasy cartography and worldbuilding. The OSM community sees these projects as complements for aspects of geography that are out of scope for OSM.^[108][109]

• Collaborative mapping – Aggregation of web mapping and user content
• Neogeography – Amateur-focused geography
• Turn-by-turn navigation – Feature of GPS navigation devices
• Volunteered geographic information – Type of user-generated content

Foody, Giles; et al. (2017). Mapping and the Citizen Sensor. London: Ubiquity Press. ISBN 978-1-911529-16-3. JSTOR j.ctv3t5qzc.

• Bennett, Jonathan (2010). OpenStreetMap: Be Your Own Cartographer. Packt Publishing. ISBN 978-1-84719-750-4.
• Ramm, Frederik; Topf, Jochen; Chilton, Steve (2010). OpenStreetMap: Using and Enhancing the Free Map of the World. UIT Cambridge. ISBN 978-1-906860-11-0.
• Murdoch, Robin; Kelly, Christian; Quinlan, Matthew; Harpster, Jubal (2020). Navigating OpenStreetMap: how to make the most of an increasingly valuable mapping asset (PDF) (Report). Dublin: Accenture. Archived from the original (PDF) on 17 November 2020.

• Official website