Is it possible to make OpenStreetMap work like Wikimapia?

Help and support
1

When I started using collaborative map editing sites I initially very briefly worked with Wikimapia before switching to OpenStreetMap after I realized this was a more widely used and supported platform with a more stable future. However, the one aspect of Wikimapia I really liked was the ability to highlight features (including a tooltip displaying the name) when you mouse over them and even click on them for more information. Is there a way to make OpenStreetMap function in this manner when not in editing mode?

In addition, the fact that your cursor doesn’t have to be exactly on the border of a feature, but can be somewhere in the middle to select it was very useful. (I don’t know how Wikimapia managed to do so well in its ability to know which level of overlapping feature you were attempting to select, but I was seriously impressed.)

Lastly, is there a way to hide or change the color of certain types of features on OSM. The multitude of different colors is useful in many situations, but it can be distracting in others.

I imagine this isn’t something that is easily doable, in which case, just consider this a review of the features of one site verses the other from someone who is an outsider to both.

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  1. The official website was intended to be a debugging view for database, so when you activate Map Data layer - OpenStreetMap Wiki in layers on the right, you still have to click the exact outlines. That’s the limit.
  2. Furthermore fundamentally, OSM don’t have an area object type. It only has way and relation of type=multipolygon . What considered as areas are generated by each application itself. It may be slightly beyond the purpose of the data layer view now.
  3. To solve all these, you need to use an actual application. https://osmand.net/ has free hourly updates on iOS and Google Play Store if you are an anyhow active contributor, which is entirely waived and unconditionally free on F-Froid. As a middle ground, https://osmapp.org/ has similar objectives as the official website. There are more specialized views on https://www.openstreetbrowser.org/ , where both the data and appearance are customizable. You can also define the data and view your need with Overpass turbo/MapCSS - OpenStreetMap Wiki , or Overpass Ultra/Styling - OpenStreetMap Wiki by industry standard Mapbox/Maplibre making the display very flexible with vector styles. If you only want to choose from pre-defined styles, you can compare different map renders on eg Map Compare | Geofabrik Tools for raster tiles.

Minutely updated vector tiles demo is being worked on. Perhaps clickable PoI can come afterwards.

Reminder: Call for Feedback on the Data Model | OpenStreetMap Blog The area object type seems somewhat stalled, alongside other data needs osmlab/osm-data-model · Discussions · GitHub

3

The closest thing on the main site today is the Map Data layer, which you can enable from the Map Layers sidebar:

A screenshot of OpenStreetMap.org with the Map Layers sidebar open on the right. An arrow points to the button that you click to open the sidebar, and another arrow points to the Map Data checkbox in the sidebar. The checkbox is checked, so the main map has an overlay of all the raw data in the database, including streets, buildings, and sidewalks.
A screenshot of OpenStreetMap.org with the Map Layers sidebar open on the right. An arrow points to the button that you click to open the sidebar, and another arrow points to the Map Data checkbox in the sidebar. The checkbox is checked, so the main map has an overlay of all the raw data in the database, including streets, buildings, and sidewalks.1920×1073 248 KB

With this overlay enabled, click any of the elements highlighted in blue to see the details about that element. This isn’t quite comparable to what Wikimapia exposes, since the OSM data model differs from Wikimapia’s, as @Kovoschiz explains.

Yes, this would be trivial for any map powered by vector tiles and a library such as MapLibre GL JS or Mapbox GL JS, using the maplibre-gl-inspect plugin.

For example, in response to a discussion about abandoned railways, I whipped up a quick demonstration of combining OSM and OHM in the same map. OHM isn’t relevant to this discussion, but I happened to install maplibre-gl-inspect with one line for debugging purposes. Thanks to this plugin, you can click the button in the upper-right corner and hover over each feature to see its properties according to the vector tiles:

A map of The Banks neighborhood of Cincinnati, rendered as translucent polygons color-coded by thematic layer, with a callout box enumerating the properties of Central Riverfront Garage.
A map of The Banks neighborhood of Cincinnati, rendered as translucent polygons color-coded by thematic layer, with a callout box enumerating the properties of Central Riverfront Garage.1920×1073 104 KB

Unlike the Map Data overlay above, the vector tiles apply some transformations and filters to OSM data, so take the specific properties with a grain of salt.