OpenStreetMap Standard Layer: Who uses it?

Room: Track 1 - Talks

Saturday, 20:00 UTC
Duration: 20 minutes (plus Q&A)


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video on YouTube (Russian (русский) translation)


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  • Paul Norman

The OpenStreetMap Standard layer is one of the high profile OpenStreetMap services, but not many people know who uses it, and where. This talk covers the goals of the service, it’s history, how it’s designed, and dives deep into how it’s used. Using improved logging functionality, we’ll get answers to these questions and more.

We’ll cover the policy and technical basics of the service, showing how changes make it to your browser through the various elements of the stack and what we set out to do by running the standard layer, including policy and history.

Diving deep into the usage, we’ll look at where people are viewing, where they’re from, daily and weekly usage patterns, and then into what sites and apps people use to view the layer, including the long tail of small sites. You’ll see how different uses put different loads on the OSMF servers, and how load doesn’t come from where people think it is.

Many people just want to see their edits on the map, and we’ll cover that too, looking at how they show up and what to do if they don’t.

Along the way we’ll learn how to see your changes on the map and see heatmaps, treemaps, and find out just what’s up with the teapots.