OpenHistoricalMap

Wait... isn't that what OHM is supposed to be? :) I hope you're planning to store your data in OHM!

UTW 2025: An Accidental Map of the History of Writing YouTube video by The Unicode Consortium

Oops! OHM was supposed to be a map of history, but linguists turned us into an accidental map of the history of writing. Minh introduces @unicode.org to our efforts with @maplibre.org to bring #HGIS to more language traditions all over the world:

youtu.be/xoqwUHvYsrs
w.wiki/JC25

#UTW2025 #i18n

In February, the #OpenHistoricalMap community added 47,171 dated elements, 5,175 buildings, and 7,924¾ railroad miles. The average age of a dated element fell by 10 months, and the average year shifted 5 months later. All this with the help of 43 new contributors – welcome!

osm.wiki/OHM/Statistics

New RVA bot! You've heard me drone on about @maprva.org's Yesterdays project, and now you get it spoon-fed to you every few hours. Give it a follow or, even better, go to yesterdays.maprva.org and place some photos yourself!

Or if you’re a mapper in or of somewhere else, stay tuned for additional online get-togethers at a more convenient time for your time zone.

OpenHistoricalMap in North America Join the OpenHistoricalMap team OSM US’s first Mappy Hour of 2026 on Wednesday, March 4th from 8 - 9 pm Eastern. This Mappy Hour kicks off the first of regular online gatherings for the OHM community ...

Mappers in or of North America, join us on March 4 for a #MappyHour hosted by @osmus.bsky.social! RSVP today:

openstreetmap.us/events/mappy...

History Hits the Road

A proof of concept for OpenHistoricalMap Americana simulates a road atlas at any point in the history of highway construction. Tour down #Route66 and the other highways that existed at the time.

openstreetmap.us/events/mappi...

forum.openhistoricalmap.org/t/openhistor...

#MappingUSA #roadgeek

Help us make 2026 an historic year by participating in our first-ever donation drive! Your generous donation will go directly toward making #OpenHistoricalMap usability and reliability improvements. Find out more on the forum:

forum.openhistoricalmap.org/t/donate-for...

#fundraiser #donate

All OpenHistoricalMap websites and APIs will be down for approximately 30 minutes this Thursday from 15:00 UTC for a planned server configuration change to improve site reliability. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Mapping USA 2026 A free virtual conference featuring two days of talks and workshops on all things OpenStreetMap.

Thanks for joining us for #MappingUSA last weekend! Good news: videos are up: www.youtube.com/playlist?lis...

#OpenStreetMap #MappingUSA #opendata #mapping #GIS #geospatial

A line chart of dates along the X axis from May 2025 to present and average age in years along the Y axis from 110 to 140 years. The series seesaws between 125 and 135 except for a drop toward the latter half of last year to 120 before rebounding to 127 this month.

A line chart of dates along the X axis from May 2025 to present and average year along the Y axis from 1920 to 1950. The series mostly stays within the 1930s, steadily rising to the early 1940s in 2025 before a steep drop back to 1938 this month.

This is the single largest increase in the average age of an element and the single largest decline in the average year since recordkeeping began in June 2023. That’s actually a good thing: it means we’re mitigating #recentism, bringing more historical balance to our coverage.

In January, the #OpenHistoricalMap community added 65,731 dated elements, 9,668 buildings, and 15,303½ railroad miles. The average dated element got over 7 years older, and the average year is now over 4 years earlier. All this with the help of 39 new contributors – welcome!

osm.wiki/OHM/Statistics

Nice workshop on georeferencing coming up Jan 31 w/ @oldinsurancemaps.net @openhistoricalmap.org & more as a part of the @osmus.bsky.social virtual conference - openstreetmap.us/events/mappi...

Tune in Jan 31 at 2pm EST to georeference maps with @oldinsurancemaps.net, historic photographs with @maprva.org , and then translate those to @openhistoricalmap.org!

📣 Calling newcomers and #OSM experts alike: the #SOTMUS2026 call for proposals is open! OSM is powered by diverse projects and innovations from people like you! We welcome proposals about anything OSM, open data, or open source.

Learn more: lnkd.in/e7aPWe6P

Submit your ideas by Feb. 16th!

Image with text at the top that reads: "Wayback Machine Then and "WIKIPEDIA.ORG" at the bottom. Below is a Wayback Machine capture of the Cartoon Network website from JUN 8, 2003.

Wikipedia turns 25 today! 🎂📚

To celebrate, we’re looking back at its baby pictures—some of the earliest captures of the site, preserved in the #WaybackMachine.

Take a nostalgic peek at early Wikipedia ⤵️

web.archive.org/web/20030301...

#WikipediaDay #Wikipedia25 @wikipedia.org

This summer, investigations unearthed evidence that a hillfort in Dumfries & Galloway may have been besieged by an invading Roman force 1,900 years ago ⚔️

Experts say the new data from Burnswark Hill "challenges long-held assumptions about Scotland’s past": www.digitscotland.com/five-of-scot...

In December, the #OpenHistoricalMap community added 55,351 dated elements, 13,877 buildings, and 8,959 railroad miles. The average age of a dated element fell by 8 months, and the average year shifted one year later. All this with the help of 31 new contributors – welcome!

osm.wiki/OHM/Statistics

We deeply appreciate all the help that #GreenInfo provided over the years. We look forward to spending an unprecedented 2026 with the #HistoricalMapping and @osmus.bsky.social communities!

A raw view of the data showing route_lines features with indexed tram route attributes.

A raw data view of the world highlighting country territories as polygons, showing details about Numidia and France.

The main #VectorTiles tileset contains route information for more informative transportation map styles. A new tileset contains territories as polygons, so your custom map can color in a country or other administrative region.

Babylonia as 𒆳𒆍𒀭𒊏𒆠 Ur as 𒌷𒀕 Uruk as 𒋀𒀕𒆠

The map can label #toponyms in #MinorityLanguages #IndigenousLanguages #AncientLanguages, like no other world atlas you’ve ever flipped through.

Hi Example, In order to complete your request, OpenHistoricalMap needs permission to access information about you, including your email address, on all projects of this site. No changes will be made with your account.

If you contribute to @wikipedia.org @wikidatacommunity.bsky.social #WikimediaCommons #Wikivoyage, you can join OpenHistoricalMap in just a few clicks, without having to juggle yet another password for yet another wiki. It works a lot like our existing OpenStreetMap login support.

OSMCha showing a changeset that adds many streets to Mannheim.

OSMCha showing a changeset that adds boundaries around the world to the French Empire.

#OSMCha can visualize giant changesets without timing out or throwing an error. No one will sneak another empire into OHM without the community noticing it.

Protection pack (web ACL) activity: summary of your protection rules and how their order contributes to terminating actions. Block-Old-Chrome-UA, Block-countries, and ipset-block-production siphon off about a sixth of the traffic. Of 53,720 requests, 47,700 are allowed and 6,030 are blocked.

#scrapers and #crawlers are waging a constant #DDOS on our site and driving up cloud hosting costs. We’re coping, but if it keeps getting worse, will OHM last? 🫠

Staying afloat, Wikimedia logins, ancient writing, and more In the half a year since we started letting you log in using your OpenStreetMap account, localize map labels into your language, and more, our development team has been busier than ever. Keeping the ...

The biggest developments in #OpenHistoricalMap tech over the past 6 months 🧵

forum.openhistoricalmap.org/t/staying-af...

LTS No 101 (November 2025) Online Flipbook created with Publuu Flipbook Maker.

Our latest bi-annual Newsletter, Issue 101, has just been published, containing articles on "Ordeal & Triumph: Middle Temple at War" and "Mapping London and the world’s history with OpenHistoricalMap".

Read it here: publuu.com/flip-book/86...

Open Historical Map interface showing a region in eastern Tennessee at 1707 CE. Title highlights: Node: Toqua [950 – 1819] Toqua (Cherokee: ᏙᏉ, romanized: Toquo) was a prehistoric and historic Native American site in Monroe County, Tennessee, located in the Southeastern Woodlands. Toqua was the site of a substantial ancestral town that thrived during the Mississippian period (1000-1600 CE). Added prehistoric Native American and Cherokee town Edited 2 minutes ago by Carwil Changeset #207314 0 Location: 35.5658732, -84.1696025

Just added my first object to OpenHistoricalMap: the Mississippian and later Cherokee town of Toqua.

#NativeSoutheast

In November, the #OpenHistoricalMap community added 62,421 dated elements, 21,441 buildings, and 8,072½ railroad miles. The average age of a dated element fell by 17 months, and the average year shifted one year later. All this with the help of 35 new contributors – welcome!

osm.wiki/OHM/Statistics

Props to @timetravel628.bsky.social for a gorgeous new way to explore the OpenHistoricalMap’s coverage of #HistoricBoundaries!

By request, here's a thread of books that I think make excellent gifts this holiday season (obviously they're cartographically inclined, you know me)

1. Best anthology
"All Over the Map" by Betsy Mason and Greg Miller
A gorgeous, full color history of maps mind-bending maps from around the world.