OpenHistoricalMap/Imports/OpenStreetMap water
In February 2013, Jeff Meyer seeded the OpenHistoricalMap database with OpenStreetMap's coverage of coastlines, bodies of water, and streams. This content is represented in the database as changeset 1, with the author set to " osmosis_user_0" (containing a space at the beginning). Although the changeset dates to 2013, the timestamps on many elements are set to shortly after midnight of the Unix epoch, resulting in characteristic, improbable relative dates like "Edited about 55 years ago" in the interface.
License
The imported data comes from the final OpenStreetMap planet file prior to OpenStreetMap's 2012 migration from Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 to Open Database License 1.0. Under the terms of CC BY-SA 2.0, we attribute OpenStreetMap on our central attribution page alongside our other major sources and give notice that each of these imported elements within the database continues to be licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.
Participants
Prevalence
The import consisted of 106,234,255 nodes, 1,631,459 ways, and 18,481 relations. These figures include untagged nodes that only represent vertices of ways and untagged ways that only represent edges of multipolygon relations. As of January 2025, this import represents fully two-thirds of the OpenHistoricalMap database in terms of the number of tagged elements: 5,782,314 tagged elements remain untouched since this import, out of a total of 8,823,663 tagged elements in the database. [1]
Outlook
This import was intended only as a seed for future contributions. Although OSM is unparalleled in its coverage of water features today, the project has come a long way since 2012, in terms of both accuracy and tagging standards. Moreover, countless hydrologic features have changed in the real world in the intervening time. If you are mapping in an area where these imported features are getting in the way, do not hesitate to replace this imported data with your own work or an import of a more local dataset of higher quality.
Further reading
- Meyer, Jeff (May 17, 2018). “Seeking a high-speed, low-drag Global GIS dataset…”. Medium.