FairwayMapper - introducing golfers to mapping! - Tagging general discussion - OpenStreetMap Community Forum

FairwayMapper - introducing golfers to mapping! - Tagging general discussion - OpenStreetMap Community Forum
FairwayMapper - introducing golfers to mapping!
General talk
Tagging general discussion
editors
development
golf
OpenCourseMaps
((renamed to FairwayMapper))
April 3, 2026, 9:39am
Hello!
I’d like to introduce a project I’ve been working on in my spare time called
OpenCourseMaps
. It’s a free, purpose-built web editor designed to make it easier for golfers and the wider community to contribute detailed golf course data to OpenStreetMap.
See it in action:
I want to be upfront: I’m new to the OSM community. I’m a golfer with 20+ years working in IT infrastructure and software development, not a seasoned mapper. This project has grown out of a genuine appreciation for what OpenStreetMap has achieved and a desire to help fill a gap I kept running into (do you know how inaccurate publicly available golf course data is?
).
I’m here to introduce what I’m building, explain my thinking, and — most importantly — get your input. I’m completely open to this project failing, it’s been super fun for me to build because I love the subject matter (golf, not mapping per-se … although I’m growing an appreciation!) … and if it flops thats entirely ok.
What is it?
OpenCourseMaps is a specialised web-based editor that sits on top of the OSM ecosystem. It focuses entirely on golf courses and understands the
leisure=golf_course
tagging scheme —
golf=hole
golf=fairway
golf=green
golf=bunker
golf=tee
golf=rough
golf=water_hazard
golf=pin
, and so on.
Rather than presenting users with the full complexity of a general-purpose editor, it offers a streamlined workflow tailored to the task: select a course, see its boundary and existing features, and start drawing holes, fairways, greens and bunkers with tools that know what they’re creating.
All edits are written back to OSM as standard changesets using the OSM API v0.6, with proper tags and correct geometry. Nothing proprietary — the data goes straight into the map for everyone.
Why build it?
OSM’s golf course data in the UK (my starting point) is a mixed bag. Many courses have a
leisure=golf_course
boundary, but very few have detailed hole-level mapping — individual fairways, greens, bunkers, tee boxes, and centre lines are largely absent.
The barrier isn’t a lack of people who care. There are plenty of golfers who
absolutely love their course
- but don’t necessarily want to wade into the full OSM experience. There’s a definite learning curve you need to go through to start mapping a golf course accurately and correctly from a data perspective I hope you would agree! You need to understand tagging conventions, geometry rules, multipolygon relations, and the subtleties of how golf features interact. I think its pretty easy to make well-intentioned mistakes.
OpenCourseMaps aims to lower that barrier by handling the tagging, geometry structure, and OSM conventions behind the scenes, while still producing clean, standards-compliant data … with a little bit of fun along the way.
What can it do today?
The editor is in early alpha. Here’s where things stand:
Course discovery
— search 3,000+ UK courses (imported from nightly Geofabrik extracts) or browse undermapped courses that need attention
Visual editing on satellite imagery
— draw and edit holes, fairways, greens, bunkers, tee boxes, rough, water hazards, cart paths, and pins, all rendered on MapLibre GL with satellite tiles
Outside-Boundary (or fog-of-war) masking
— the course boundary is highlighted with the surrounding area dimmed, keeping focus on the course itself
Hole-by-hole workflow
— select a hole, draw its features, set par/SI/yardage, work through the scorecard
Course metadata editing
— address, website, phone, email and opening hours can be edited inline and will be written back as standard OSM tags on the
leisure=golf_course
feature
Scorecard Import -
take the complexity of correctly tagging every hole, with every tee box and variable distance/stroke indexes into a simple, upload image, extract data, go!
OSM authentication
— sign in with your OSM account via OAuth2
Boundary detection
— automatic handling of MultiPolygon boundaries from OSM - and caution applied where no boundary is detected.
Achievements — encouraging quality, not speed
Inspired by StreetComplete’s achievement system, OpenCourseMaps includes an achievement framework designed to encourage thorough, high-quality contributions rather than volume for volume’s sake.
There are three categories:
Mapping milestones
reward sustained contribution — your first course mapped, your 10th, your 50th. These track your personal journey and progress over time.
Quality badges
are the ones I’m most interested in. These reward
completeness
: adding a website and phone number to a course, filling in a full scorecard with pars and stroke indices, mapping every green or every bunker on a course. The idea is to nudge contributors toward finishing what they start rather than rushing through partial edits. If you’ve mapped all 18 greens on a course, you’ve genuinely improved the data — that deserves recognition.
Community badges
recognise OSM contributions directly: your first changeset uploaded, helping improve a course someone else started, and so on.
Achievements are deliberately
not
tied to competitive leaderboards or time pressure - but we’re golfers, we do love a bit of competition! The emphasis is on completeness and accuracy, not speed. I’m aware of the community’s concerns around gamification incentivising sloppy edits, and I’ve tried to design around that — every achievement should correlate with genuinely better data in OSM.
That said, I’d welcome feedback on whether this strikes the right balance. If there are achievement ideas that would better serve data quality, or concerns about the ones I’ve chosen, I’m all ears.
Technology
For those interested in the stack:
Frontend
: React 19, TypeScript, Vite, MapLibre GL JS, MapboxDraw
Backend
: Supabase (PostgreSQL + PostGIS) for course data and feature storage
OSM integration
: OSM API v0.6 for live data, osm-auth v3 for OAuth2, OsmChange XML generation
Data pipeline
: Geofabrik PBF extracts processed with osmium-tool for the initial course catalogue
The code will be open-sourced once the alpha reaches a stable point. The intention is for the approach to be adaptable — other sports or facility types with similar “domain-specific mapping” needs could potentially adopt and adapt the pattern.
What I’m asking for
I’m here because I want to do this properly, not in isolation. Specifically:
Feedback on the approach
— Is a domain-specific editor like this welcome in the OSM ecosystem? Are there concerns I should be thinking about? I’ve read the Organised Editing Guidelines and want to make sure I’m aligned with community expectations.
Tagging review
— I’m following the
leisure=golf_course
wiki page and the
Key:golf
scheme. If there are conventions, edge cases, or community preferences I might be missing, I’d really appreciate a pointer.
Quality assurance input
— What validation should the editor enforce before allowing uploads? I want to make it hard for users to accidentally create bad data. Overlapping polygons, missing tags, malformed geometries (hello
Problematic mapping/golf - OpenStreetMap Wiki
) — what are the common pitfalls you see with golf course edits?
Early testers
— If anyone fancies having a go with it I should have a version you can play with soon (not connected to the OSM Dev database yet), I’d welcome the feedback. The editor is live at
opencoursemaps.com
, currently covering UK courses. You’ll need an OSM account to authenticate.
General advice
— As someone new to this community, I’m sure there are norms and practices I don’t know about yet. Happy to be pointed in the right direction.
A note on data integrity
I take data quality seriously. The editor is designed with guardrails:
All features are constrained within the course boundary (a 30m buffer prevents edge rejection but keeps things within reason)
Tags are applied automatically based on feature type — users don’t manually type tag keys
The snap engine aligns to existing OSM nodes where possible, avoiding duplicate geometry
OsmChange files can be exported and reviewed before any upload
The underlying node registry tracks OSM way IDs so edits are proper modifications, not destructive create/delete cycles
I’m a firm believer that tools like this should make it
harder
to create bad data, not just easier to create data.
Thanks for reading. I’m genuinely grateful for the project that OSM is, and I want to contribute back in a way that’s useful and respectful. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts — positive, critical, or otherwise.
A special thank you to
Jonas [EU/CO]
on the OSM Discord who has put up with my many questions and provided epic answers this past week!
JW - OpenCourseMaps
6 Likes
SimonPoole
(Simon Poole)
April 3, 2026, 10:03am
Looks interesting and afaik would be the first special purpose editor that allows “full” geometry manipulation..
My greatest concern is that manipulating OSM geometries and the interaction with tagging is a bit of a black art (aka there’s a lot of undocumented business logic involved). You might be able to side step some of this, but I’m not completely convinced. See
PS:
Trademark Policy - OpenStreetMap Foundation
3 Likes
OpenCourseMaps
((renamed to FairwayMapper))
April 3, 2026, 7:07pm
Thanks for the link to the trademark policy, very useful, a rename is in order!
That video is fantastic - unearthed a few gems for me to explore - thank you
@SimonPoole
SimonPoole
(Simon Poole)
April 3, 2026, 8:03pm
The video is quite old, for example it was before the
step_count
upset (a triviality that simply nobody had on their radar), with other words things haven’t got better since then.
JustSmitty
(Just Smitty)
April 13, 2026, 4:07am
This looks like a great project. I would be open to being a US tester for you.
HuggeK
(Hugo Karlsson)
April 13, 2026, 10:24am
This is great! Exactly the reason I got into OSM - I actually have thinking about doing such a thing for years. I´m more than happy to help over in Sweden and on the project itself.
HuggeK
(Hugo Karlsson)
April 13, 2026, 10:30am
I would love to acopany this to build a viewer for golf courses in Maplibre JS with 3D featurs to be able to go hole by hole and sviwel with the lables adapting - getting the out of bounds lines marked with a tranclucent wall would also be great - I have some proposed tags for that on the wiki, see
Proposal:Golf=fringe - OpenStreetMap Wiki
Proposal:Golf=fairway marker - OpenStreetMap Wiki
Proposal:Golf=out of bounds - OpenStreetMap Wiki
Proposal:Golf:first cut - OpenStreetMap Wiki
Something also we need to adress is the unfortunate currernt golf tagging scheme - it is hard to with data distinguess holes of different courses who intersect to the same golf club (the contact details shouldn´t they actually be on the golf club (maybe a relation?) becuase the contact details are for the club and not a particular course… It would be sooo great if we could modernize the golf tagging scheme to append something on the course lines/features of a hole to associate it with a particular course so a viewer could step through all holes in sequence with the data on a chosen course… and not just random ref= tags which if the fairways intersect etc it is hard to get a understanding of it)
Fran_Marasco
(Fran Marasco)
April 15, 2026, 11:11am
Hi man, I could collaborate. I’m a software engineer and golf lover.
If you want some contributions I have some time just write to me and we talk.
Nice project
1 Like
TrickyFoxy
(Tricky Foxy)
April 21, 2026, 1:19pm
@OpenCourseMaps
What’s the current website for the editor? It seems
is no longer working :(
OpenCourseMaps
((renamed to FairwayMapper))
April 21, 2026, 7:02pm
10
@TrickyFoxy
@Fran_Marasco
@HuggeK
@JustSmitty
Thank you for the feedback! I’ve been on holiday for a couple of weeks but will be getting back into it soon! The name has been changed to
FairwayMapper.com
(still not live) - but will be open for beta in the next week or so.
At the moment its just UK courses, mainly because I’m in the process of setting up my own Overpass mirror - the public one just isn’t reliable enough sadly. I was down that rabbit hole just before I went on leave but shouldn’t take long to add ROW (memory and storage limits permitting).
3D Viewer with lidar powered topography is definitely on my list!
1 Like
HuggeK
(Hugo Karlsson)
April 21, 2026, 7:38pm
11
Great! I started gathering some
GitHub - HuggeK/opencoursemap: Proposal for project to build a mobile first interactive vector based golf course map viewer. · GitHub
- tldr; We need to develop a vector tile schema for golf courses, then generate vector tiles for golf features on all courses (as a mask of all courses in the world to save space/compute) MLT tiles could be nice and then use it with
for 3D topography in mapblire gl js. Then develop a vector style with nice grass textures and find 3D textures for tree types mapped to osm trees.