Near realtime OpenStreetMap data and stats: OSHDB and ohsome API are now updated hourly | Heidelberg Institute for Geoinformation Technology

We have exciting ohsome news! As many of you know, past OSHDB updates happened weekly and led to a delay between the data in OpenStreetMap (OSM) and our database. Basically, you had to wait up to a week to see changes in OSM reflected in the OSHDB. From this point forward, that lag is a thing of the past! Well… almost.

With our latest release, the data of the OSHDB is updated in near real-time every hour. Now, it is possible to send requests to the ohsome API and explore the most recent developments within OSM. With this improvement, you can answerquestions like the following:

The hourly mapping activity for Heidelberg shows some interesting patterns. On 2022-09-02, Heidelberg’s mapper community edited OSM either in the morning between 7-11 am or in the evening between 8-9 pm. No Night-Time-Mappers found. 😉

This figure gives you the full temporal detail of OSM. Running an analysis such as this one can help you understand mapping activity during mapathons or when you need immediate feedback. This might also reveal when the obligatory mapathon-pizza-break happened.

In this figure, we see that there are about 50-70 daily active users in Denmark. Let’s check this regularly and find out if we will see 100 active mappers sometime in the future. You can use our scripts to monitor and run it on your own.

If you want to run the analysis on your own, you can check out this snippet and easily adjust the parameters. If you are curious as to how up-to-date the data of the OSHDB is, take a look at the metadata of the ohsome API. The “toTimestamp” attribute will tell you when the data was last updated.

Background info: the aim of the ohsome OpenStreetMap History Data Analytics Platform is to make OpenStreetMap’s full-history data more easily accessible for various kinds of OSM data analytics tasks, such as data quality analysis, on a regional, country-wide, or global scale. The ohsome API is one of its components, providing free and easy access to some of the functionalities of the ohsome platform via HTTP requests. Some intro can be found here: