Notes/Advanced use

Notes view URL

To create a (perma)link which displays the map with notes already turned on (while not changing other layer selections) use the URL parameter notes=yes (for example openstreetmap.org?notes=yes).

Statistics

Statistics for the number of note actions (open, closed, reopen, comment) filterable by country: http://resultmaps.neis-one.org/osm-notes

Viewing notes by user

If a user was logged in while creating or commenting on a note, the note or comment is marked as being posted by that user. You can see all of the notes and comments written by a user on the page www.openstreetmap.org/user/xyz/notes (where xyz is their user name).

If you want to see only unresolved notes for one (or more) users, you use 3rd party service at my-notes.osm-hr.org (GitHub source)

Viewing notes by area (via RSS feed)

You can view and subscribe to an RSS feed of all the note activity in your area. This allows you to keep an overview of the things reported in your area you map in. The URL for the RSS feed is

https://www.openstreetmap.org/api/0.6/notes/feed?bbox=smaller_longitude,smaller_latitude,larger_longitude,larger_latitude

You can easily find the longitude and latitude values by clicking on 'Export' on OSM and then click on the link "Manually select a different area". Then you can drag the corners of the area you want covered in your RSS feed. The values in the left and right boxes (in the 'Export' area on the left) represent the longitude values, the values in the top and bottom boxes represent the latitude values.

If you do not want to generate the bounding box manually you can use this OSM Quality Assurance Tool: http://tyrasd.github.io/osm-qa-feeds/

GPX export of notes

You can export a file (in GPX format) of notes within a bounding box using a link like this:

https://api.openstreetmap.org/api/0.6/notes.gpx?bbox=24.149,56.911,24.3476,56.9665

(where the bounding box for the export is as so: bbox=[smaller_longitude],[smaller_latitude],[larger_longitude],[larger_latitude] )

Technically - this provides gpx waypoints where the note number is the name of the waypoint, and the comments are the waypoint description.

Search for Notes with a keyword

A nice web interface to search among text of Notes is here: https://ent8r.github.io/NotesReview/

Notes dump

As of August 2014, the entire notes database is downloadable from https://planet.openstreetmap.org/notes/. The dump file contains notes text, status fields, and all comments, but no hidden notes. As of June 2018, there were over 1,400,000 notes with a compressed file size (using bzip2) of 92 MB. Compared to August 2014 with 200,000 notes, 400,000 comments and a compressed size of only 13 MB. The notes dumps are produced using https://github.com/iandees/planet-notes-dump.

An archive of this dump file is also available on the Internet Archive on a daily basis. This is particularly useful if you are researching for notes made for a certain date. Archives are available since December 17, 2014.