this post was submitted on 20 Apr 2025
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I'm currently mapping the village i live in (northern Germany). The building outlines and streets where already done by somebody else, so i mainly added the addresses to most buildings in my village and corrected some of the outlines. I did this with Organic Maps and later Vespucci.

Now my question: what other information is important enough to map?

I could go around and map every tree and specify the roof types for the buildings, but that would take ages and I think there are other details that are way more important to map for everyday openstreetmap users.

Is there some wiki page that lists the most important attributes that should be mapped? I searched on the OSM wiki but couldn't find such a list.

Thanks in advance.

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[–] vk6flab@lemmy.radio 2 points 4 days ago

Anything that has a physical location or relationship can be mapped.

If you can find existing datasets you can add those to the map without needing to manually collect the data.

You can also consider things like floodplains, historical flooding records, traffic flows and anything else will a geographical bent.

This will never be finished because things are always in flux.

One thing that you should consider is what maintenance looks like. Keep track of where datasets came from and when you retrieved them. Some countries, regions and municipalities maintain public data that you might be able to use. Make sure you comply with any licences attached to the data.

You can also use things like the local cadastre which tracks land and building boundaries and ownership.