OpenStreetMap is the Wikipedia of maps. It is a free, open, crowd-sourced map of the entire world, built by a community of millions of volunteers and used as the data backbone for thousands of products you already use, from weather apps to hiking apps to ride-share platforms.
This guide explains what OpenStreetMap actually is, how it works as a data set, what its licence asks of you when you build on it, and what role it plays inside a modern production mapping stack like MapAtlas.
The Project, in One Paragraph
OpenStreetMap (OSM) was founded in 2004 in the United Kingdom by Steve Coast, after he grew frustrated with the lack of freely available digital map data. The idea was to build a map of the world the way Wikipedia was building an encyclopedia: anyone can sign up, anyone can add or edit a feature, and the resulting data is published under an open license. Today the project has more than 10 million registered users and a stable base of about 250,000 active mappers per year. The full planet file is about 88 GB as compressed PBF and grows every minute.
What OSM Looks Like as Data
OSM is not a folder of map tiles. It is a structured database of three primitive types:
- Nodes: single points with a latitude and longitude. Used for things that are essentially a point (a bench, a tree, a parking meter), and as the building blocks of more complex shapes.
- Ways: ordered sequences of nodes. Used for linear features (a road segment, a river) and closed shapes (a building footprint, a park boundary).
- Relations: groupings of nodes and ways. Used for things like bus routes (a sequence of road segments), administrative boundaries (a polygon made up of many ways), and multipolygon features.
Every node, way, and relation has a set of key-value tags. A road might have highway=residential, name=Rue de Rivoli, maxspeed=30. A coffee shop might have amenity=cafe, name=Cafe Central, opening_hours=Mo-Fr 07:00-19:00, wheelchair=yes. The tagging vocabulary is community-defined, evolving, and documented on the OSM wiki.
This combination of open primitives and tagged metadata is what makes OSM so reusable. You can extract every cycle path in Berlin, every defibrillator in the Netherlands, or every wine region in France with one structured query.
How the Map Gets Made
OSM is edited continuously by volunteers using web editors (iD), desktop editors (JOSM), and mobile editors (Vespucci, StreetComplete). Edits flow into a central database within minutes. Source material includes:
- Aerial imagery licensed for OSM use (Bing, Esri, and national orthophotos)
- GPS traces uploaded by community members
- Government open data (cadastre, road inventories, address files)
- Local knowledge, especially for opening hours, names, accessibility, and small features
- Mass imports of structured data sets (carefully reviewed, since bad imports damage data quality)
Quality control is community-driven: experienced mappers review changes, automated tools flag suspicious edits, and per-region communities maintain local conventions. The result is a map that is unusually detailed in places where the community is active (Western Europe, urban North America, Japan) and patchier in less-mapped regions, where commercial alternatives sometimes have an edge.
This is also why categories a commercial vendor would never carry end up on the open map. Traffic enforcement cameras are tagged with highway=speed_camera and enforcement relations, and an Overpass count on 27 August 2026 returned 76,800 worldwide.
OSM and the Wider Open Map Data Landscape
OSM is the best-known source of open map data: geographic data published under a license that lets anyone use, modify, and redistribute it. "Open" describes the license, not the price. Plenty of free map data only lets you look, while open data lets you build and pass it on.
Since 2022 there is a second large open dataset. The Overture Maps Foundation, backed by Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, and TomTom and hosted by the Linux Foundation, publishes versioned releases organised into themes such as transportation, buildings, places, addresses, and divisions. Overture ingests OSM, adds data contributed by its members and features derived by machine learning (building footprints detected from imagery, for example), and runs everything through conflation and quality checks.
The licensing differs in a way that matters. OSM uses the ODbL, a share-alike license: if you publicly distribute a database derived from OSM, that database must also be offered under ODbL, with attribution. Most Overture layers use permissive licenses such as CDLA-Permissive, which drop the share-alike obligation, although layers that carry OSM data keep OSM's terms. Before you ship, check the license on each specific layer you use.
Overture's most debated contribution is GERS, the Global Entity Reference System, which gives each road, building, or place a stable ID that persists across releases, so you can join your own records to the map without re-matching by name and coordinates each time. In February 2026 the Open Geospatial Consortium requested public comment on adopting GERS as an OGC Community Standard. Supporters see a long-missing universal join key; critics in the OSM community worry about an identifier scheme governed by a group of large companies becoming the default for data that volunteers maintain.
Using OSM in a commercial product: the ODbL in plain words
OSM data is published under the Open Database License (ODbL) 1.0. Commercial use is allowed. The OpenStreetMap Foundation's licence and legal FAQ says the data may be used "for any purpose you like", including commercial, and that you may charge for services built on it. The licence asks for two things in return, attribution and share-alike, and what each means depends on what you ship.
| What you ship | ODbL category | What you must do |
|---|---|---|
| A map in a website or app: tiles, a static image, a printed map | Produced Work | Credit OpenStreetMap on or next to the map. You may license the map itself under any terms |
| Geocoding results stored next to your own customer or store records | Insubstantial extracts, under the OSMF geocoding guideline | Credit OpenStreetMap where the results are shown. Your own records do not become ODbL data |
| A corrected or extended copy of OSM data that you publish or give to customers | Derivative Database, publicly used | Offer that database under the ODbL, with attribution |
| OSM data merged with your own data, used only inside your company | Derivative Database, not publicly used | Nothing to share while it stays internal |
| OSM data kept as a separate layer next to independent datasets | Collective Database | The ODbL applies to the OSM part only |
Attribution. The Foundation's attribution guidelines ask for a credit to OpenStreetMap that shows the data is under the ODbL, with a link to openstreetmap.org/copyright. On an interactive map the credit typically sits in a corner, and it must be visible without clicking or hovering. The familiar line "© OpenStreetMap contributors" meets that. Keep the attribution control that your map library or API adds, and do not hide it with CSS to save space.
Share-alike. It applies to databases, and only when you make public use of them. If your team fixes missing house numbers in OSM data and ships that database to customers, the fixed database goes out under the ODbL. If the fixes stay on an internal server, nothing has to be shared. Rendering a map from your improved data does not make the map or your app code open, but the FAQ adds a condition: anyone who receives the Produced Work can ask for the data behind it, including a Derivative Database you used.
Geocoding. Under the Foundation's geocoding guideline, individual geocoding results are insubstantial extracts. You can store them next to proprietary data without a share-alike effect on that data, as long as you credit OpenStreetMap and do not systematically collect results to rebuild a substantial part of the database.
These are the Foundation's own interpretations, summarised; they are not legal advice. The OSMF licence pages linked above are the reference when a use case sits between two rows of the table.
How Production APIs Build on OSM
You almost never call the OSM database directly in production. Instead, you use a hosted API that builds on OSM data and adds the layers OSM does not provide on its own:
- Tile rendering: rendering the full planet into fast map tiles for every zoom level requires a serious tile pipeline. Hosted providers do this for you.
- Geocoding: turning addresses into coordinates needs an indexed search engine on top of OSM, plus heuristics for ranking and disambiguation.
- Routing and isochrones: OSM has the road graph, but computing actual driving directions and travel-time polygons needs a routing engine (OSRM, Valhalla, GraphHopper) running on dedicated infrastructure.
- Map matching, distance matrices, optimisation: same story.
- SLAs, EU hosting, GDPR compliance: hosted providers package the data with the contract terms enterprise teams need.
MapAtlas is the European mapping platform built on OSM-grade data with EU-only hosting, GDPR-clean infrastructure, and developer-grade APIs for geocoding, routing, isochrones, distance matrices, and dynamic styled maps.
When You Need Direct OSM Data
Sometimes you do want the raw data. Common cases:
- Bulk analysis: counting all electric vehicle charging stations in Germany, mapping every defibrillator in Spain.
- Custom GIS workflows: importing into PostGIS for spatial joins.
- Internal map products: rendering your own tiles with full control over the style.
- Data enrichment: adding OSM tags to your own location records.
For these, the Geofabrik extracts or Overpass API are the standard entry points. Both are free, both run on volunteer infrastructure, and both come with attribution and license terms you should respect in any redistributed product.
Why MapAtlas
MapAtlas builds developer-grade APIs on top of OSM-derived data with EU-only hosting and GDPR-clean infrastructure. The Geocoding API, Search API, Directions API, and Isochrone API all return clean, well-tagged location records that work cleanly in production code and in the structured data you ship to AI assistants. For a hands-on intro, try the Coordinates Lookup tool or read What Is a Geocode for the deeper context.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is OpenStreetMap?
OpenStreetMap (OSM) is a free, open, crowd-sourced map of the entire world, maintained by a global community of volunteers. Anyone can edit the map, add new roads or places, and reuse the data under the Open Database License. Behind the scenes, OSM is a structured database of nodes, ways, and relations that describes streets, buildings, points of interest, transport networks, and natural features. Many of the maps you see on weather apps, hiking apps, ride-share apps, and developer-grade map APIs are powered by OSM data, often with proprietary enhancements layered on top.
Is OpenStreetMap free to use commercially?
Yes. OpenStreetMap data is licensed under the Open Database License (ODbL), and the OpenStreetMap Foundation's licence FAQ says it may be used for any purpose, including commercial, and that you may charge for services built on it. In return you credit OpenStreetMap wherever the data is shown and offer any database you derive from it and publicly use under the ODbL. The tile servers at openstreetmap.org are a different matter: they run on donated capacity with no SLA, and their usage policy forbids bulk downloading and lets heavy traffic be blocked without notice, so production apps use a hosted tile service built on OSM data or render their own tiles.
What does the ODbL require when I use a map or API built on OpenStreetMap?
Two things. Attribution: credit OpenStreetMap on or next to the map, visible without a click, with a link to openstreetmap.org/copyright; the familiar line '© OpenStreetMap contributors' does this. Share-alike: if you publicly use a database you derived from OSM data, for example an improved road network you publish or hand to customers, you must offer that database under the ODbL. Maps, tiles and images you render are Produced Works that you may license as you like, and geocoding results stored next to your own records do not turn your records into ODbL data under the Foundation's geocoding guideline.
What is an OSM tag and why does it matter?
Every feature in OpenStreetMap has a set of key-value tags that describe what it is. A road might be tagged `highway=residential`, a restaurant `amenity=restaurant`, a bus stop `highway=bus_stop`. The tagging vocabulary is community-defined and documented on the OSM wiki. Tags are what let downstream tools filter the data sensibly: you can query 'all hospitals in Paris' or 'all charging stations in Berlin' because each feature is tagged consistently. Production geocoders (including MapAtlas) lean on OSM tags to score the relevance of a match.
What is the difference between OpenStreetMap and Overture Maps?
OpenStreetMap is a volunteer community project started in 2004 that anyone can edit, published under the share-alike Open Database License (ODbL). Overture Maps is an industry foundation launched in 2022 by Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, and TomTom under the Linux Foundation. It publishes versioned releases that blend OSM with members' own data and machine-derived features, and most of its layers use permissive licenses such as CDLA-Permissive without a share-alike requirement. Overture consumes OSM, so the two are complementary open map data sources rather than replacements for each other.
