Make Your First Edit to OpenStreetMap in the Next 15 Minutes | Website Wizard JOSM Plugin

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Make Your First Edit to OpenStreetMap in the Next 15 Minutes
Website Wizard JOSM Plugin

Intro
This quick tutorial will help you make a meaningful contribution to OpenStreetMap (OSM) in less than 15 minutes. By the end, you will have added an official website tag to a nearby shop or amenity. Soon after, your contribution will be ingested into dozens of free OSM-based services, helping people worldwide.
Why a website tag? Once a place in OSM has a website tag, it becomes way easier to determine other helpful info about that place. Nearly every place’s official website has info about its phone, opening_hours, email, and other tags. So adding a website tag is a great place to get started.
Got your stopwatch out? Ready, set, go!
1. Create an OSM account
Sign up for a free OSM account and then confirm your email.
2. Download and Run JOSM
Download JOSM (~365 MB) for your specific operating system and then run it.
JOSM, the Java OSM editor app, is a powerful tool for querying and editing OSM data. While simpler in-browser editors exist, JOSM offers plugins that make your edit as quick and easy as possible.
3. Download OSM Data

Press Ctrl+Shift+↓ (or ⌘+Shift+↓ on Mac) to open the Download dialog
Determine your area of interest (AOI). It should be somewhere you’re familiar with, no larger than a few city blocks.
Locate your AOI on the map. You can pan the map with ctrl+click dragging and zoom in by scrolling.
Click and drag to create a box around your AOI
Click ⬇️ Download. If this fails, your AOI was probably too large. Choose a smaller AOI and try again.

4. Filter Irrelevant OSM Data

Now we’ll filter the OSM data to only show shops and amenities that don’t have a website.

Find the Filter panel on the right side of the screen
Click the + icon to open the Filter dialog
Copy/paste the following query into the Search string text field
name=* ((amenity=* "addr:housenumber"=*) | shop=*) -website=* -"contact:website"=*

Click Submit filter
Check E, uncheck H, and check I in the Filter panel. You should now only see the relevant places in your AOI.

5. Set Up the Website Wizard Plugin

Press F12 (or ⌘+, on Mac) to open JOSM’s Preferences dialog
Click the 🧩 puzzle piece icon on the left side to open the Plugins config
Click ⬇️ Download list
Scroll down the list of plugins until you see 🌐 WebsiteWizard
Check its checkbox
Click OK to install it

6. Search for an Official Website

Click the 🌐 icon on the left side of the screen to show the 🌐 Website Wizard panel on the right side of the screen
Type your AOI’s city and/or neighborhood into Website Wizard’s Search Prefix text field
Click a shop or amenity in your AOI
Click Search to open DuckDuckGo in your default browser with the query autofilled as the Search Prefix + the place’s name
Determine if any of the search results represent the official website for your place. Do NOT use search results for social media profiles, review sites, or other business aggregators. When in doubt, don’t use it. If you don’t find one, just repeat steps 3 to 5 with another place in your AOI.
Copy/paste the official website URL into the Website URL text field
Click Save. If you make a mistake, you can always press ctrl+z (⌘+z on Mac) to undo it.

7. Upload Your Changeset

Press Ctrl+Shift+↑ (or ⌘+Shift+↑ on Mac) to open the Upload dialog
Type Add website to <city and/or neighborhood> shops and amenities in the text field labeled Provide a brief comment…
Select survey in the dropdown labeled Specify the data source…
Click Upload Changes, which will open OSM in your browser
Enter your OSM credentials
Click Log In
Click Authorize to allow JOSM to create the changeset for you

Conclusion
🎉🎊🥳 Congratulations- you just made OSM a little bit better for everyone! Plus you got a preview of some of the cool things you can do with JOSM and OSM data.
So what next?
You could keep going and add a website tag to every place in your AOI. For example, I quickly added 66 new website tags in Seattle’s Wallingford neighborhood in this changeset.
Or you could modify the filter to show places in your AOI with a website tag but no phone tag. Then you could add the phone tag based on info from the website.
Or you could spread the word about OSM and Website Wizard! The United States alone has more than 1 million shops. So if we want to put them all on the map, we’ll need to get many more people to help.
No matter what’s next, feel proud for pushing OSM a little closer toward becoming the world’s greatest map!

This page was generated by GitHub Pages.

This tutorial outlines a method for making a contribution to OpenStreetMap by adding website tags to shops and amenities using the JOSM plugin within less than fifteen minutes. The motivation behind adding a website tag is to facilitate the retrieval of additional pertinent information about a location, as official websites typically contain details such as phone numbers, opening hours, and email addresses.

The process begins with establishing the necessary groundwork. First, a free OpenStreetMap account must be created and confirmed, followed by downloading and executing JOSM, which serves as a powerful Java-based editor for querying and modifying OSM data. Next, the relevant OSM data must be downloaded, requiring the user to define an Area of Interest (AOI), which should be limited to a small, familiar geographic area, and then select the data to download.

A crucial step involves filtering the downloaded data to isolate the target locations. The user must employ a specific search query within JOSM's filter panel to focus only on shops and amenities that currently lack a website tag. This query is designed to select features where either the name is a shop or an amenity, and where the specific website tag is absent. After filtering, the user refines the view by adjusting the visibility settings for elements such as E, H, and I to display only the relevant results within the chosen AOI.

To enable the website tagging functionality, the WebsiteWizard plugin must be installed. This is accomplished by accessing JOSM’s preferences, navigating to the plugins configuration, downloading the list, and installing the WebsiteWizard plugin.

The next phase focuses on acquiring the required website data. The WebsiteWizard panel is then utilized to search for official websites. The process involves inputting the city or neighborhood names from the AOI and selecting a specific shop or amenity within that area. A search is then executed, which launches an external search engine like DuckDuckGo with the location and place name prefilled as the query. The user must exercise judgment in evaluating the search results, ensuring that only official website URLs are selected and explicitly avoiding results from social media profiles, review sites, or other business aggregators. If a valid website is not found for a location, the user is instructed to repeat the selection and searching steps for another location within the AOI. Once a valid URL is identified, it is copied and pasted into the designated field, and the change is saved.

Finally, all collected edits are consolidated and uploaded to OpenStreetMap. This involves opening the Upload dialog, specifying a brief comment detailing the changes, selecting the data source as survey, and initiating the upload. The user must then authenticate their OSM credentials and authorize JOSM to generate the changeset, which allows the modified data to be submitted to OSM. The process concludes with the successful contribution of website information to the map. Subsequent actions suggested involve continuing the tagging process for all features in the AOI, developing further filters to correlate tags (e.g., adding phone numbers based on found website information), or promoting the use of the WebsiteWizard plugin to increase community participation in mapping efforts.