OpenStreetMap was created by Steve Coast in response to the Ordnance Survey, the United Kingdom's national mapping agency, failing to release its data to the public under free licences in 2004.

The database is hosted by the OpenStreetMap Foundation, a non-profit organisation registered in England and Wales and is funded mostly[weasel words] via donations.

Steve Coast founded the project in 2004 while attending University College London, initially focusing on mapping the United Kingdom.

[3] In the UK and elsewhere, government-run and tax-funded projects like the Ordnance Survey created massive datasets but declined to freely and widely distribute them.

[12] In March 2008, two founders of CloudMade, a commercial company that uses OpenStreetMap data, announced that they had received venture capital funding of €2.4 million.

[13] In 2010, AOL launched an OSM-based version of MapQuest and committed $1 million to increasing OSM's coverage of local communities for its Patch website.

[17] The OSM project aims to collect data about stationary objects throughout the world, including infrastructure and other aspects of the built environment, points of interest, land use and cover classifications, and topography.

[39] OSM publishes official database dumps of the entire "planet" for reuse on minutely and weekly intervals, formatted as XML or binary Protocol Buffers.

[41] From 2020 to 2024, Meta published the Daylight Map Distribution, which applied quality assurance processes and added some external datasets to OSM data to make it more production-ready.

Ground survey data is collected by volunteers traditionally using tools such as a handheld GPS unit, a notebook, digital camera and voice recorder.

[44] Additionally, more recently apps such as StreetComplete offer "quests" to users in nearby vicinity, allowing them to add metadata to specific points of interest (such as, for example, the opening hours of a restaurant or whether or not a particular crosswalk has tactile paving).

As collecting and uploading data may be separated from editing objects, contribution to the project is possible without using a GPS unit, such as by using paper mapping.

[55][56] Meta develops a fork of this editor, Rapid, that provides access to external datasets, including some derived from machine learning detections.

Changesets submitted through editors and the OSM API immediately enter the database and are quickly published for reuse, without going through peer review beforehand.

Members of the community detect and fix most unintentional errors and vandalism promptly,[60] by monitoring the slippy map and revision history on the main website, as well as by searching for issues using tools like OSMCha, OSM Inspector, and Osmose.

[77] In eight Southeast Asian countries, Grab has contributed more than 800,000 kilometres (500,000 mi) of roads based on drivers' GPS traces, including many narrow alleyways that are missing from other mapping platforms.

[79] The top 13 corporate contributors during 2014–2020 include Apple, Kaart, Amazon, Facebook, Mapbox, Digital Egypt, Grab, Microsoft, Telenav, Developmentseed, Uber, Lightcyphers and Lyft.

Community emergency response teams in San Francisco and elsewhere organize field surveys and mapathons to contribute information about fire alarm call boxes, hazard symbols, and other relevant features.

[82] Since 2007, the OpenStreetMap community has organised State of the Map (SotM), an annual international conference at which stakeholders present on technical progress and discuss policy issues.

A reference implementation of a slippy map (featuring a selection of third-party tile layers), a revision log, and integrations with basic geocoders and route planners facilitate the community's management of the database contents.

The website's built-in REST API and OAuth authentication enable third-party applications to programmatically interact with the site's major functionality, including submitting changes.

Alternatively, a server application converts raw OSM data into vector tiles according to a schema, such as Mapbox Streets, OpenMapTiles, or Shortbread.

[92] OpenSeaMap is a world nautical chart built as a mashup of OpenStreetMap, crowdsourced water depth tracks, and third-party weather and bathymetric data.

[95] The locator maps on Craigslist,[96] Facebook,[97] Flickr,[98] Foursquare City Guide,[99] Gurtam's Wialon,[100] and Snapchat[101] are also powered by OSM.

Geographic information retrieval systems such as NLMaps Web[108] and OSCAR[109] answer natural language queries based on OSM data.

The annual Forest Landscape Integrity Index is based on a comprehensive map of remaining roadless areas derived from OSM's road network.

OSM's road and building coverage allow them to discover patterns of disease outbreaks and target interventions such as antimalarial medications toward remote villages.

[139][140] The resulting data and maps have been used by several organisations providing relief aid, such as the World Bank, the European Commission Joint Research Centre, the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, UNOSAT and others.

One of the earliest such games was Hasbro's short-lived Monopoly City Streets (2009), which offered a choice between OSM and Google Maps as the playing board.

[147] Flight simulators combine OSM's coverage of roads and structures with other sources of natural environment data, acting as sophisticated 3D map renderers, in order to add realism to the ground below.