Editorial of OSM Science 2024

In August of 2024, OpenStreetMap (OSM) celebrated its 20th birthday. OSM has grown from a small UK-based mapping project into the largest crowdsourced and volunteered geospatial database in the world. Here, as part of the seventh edition of the Academic Track at the annual State of the Map (SotM) conference, we celebrate the first global SotM on the continent of Africa. This year’s OSM Science, as is the case with all previous editions of the Academic Track, delivers a consolidated knowledge hub for the gathering, sharing, and reporting of scientific progress in OSM-related research. Crucially, this platform facilitates the sharing of scientific findings about OSM directly with the broader OSM community. SotM 2024 took place from the 6th to 8th September 2024 in Nairobi, Kenya with OSM Science and the Academic Track taking place on Sunday September 8th in its own dedicated session. The OSM Science Proceedings include 11 short papers corresponding to talks presented at the conference. In this Editorial, we summarize these papers by briefly discussing their contributions and attempting to group these works into broad but also interrelated research topics. While this grouping reflects our own interpretation of the contributions and research outcomes of each work, each extended abstract within the Proceedings provides more details and information about the corresponding research.

MOONEY Peter;  GRINBERGER A. Yair;  MINGHINI Marco; 

2025-10-20

Zenodo

JRC140845

https://zenodo.org/records/17333473,    https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC140845,   

10.5281/zenodo.17333473 (online),