"Pin je Punt" project with Visit Flanders

08.03.2022 - OpenStreetMap Belgium

Visit Flanders and the five touristic organisations of the Flemish provinces have been working together on open data for ten years. This includes the famous node networks for walking and cycling.

On March 8th, they launched the “Pin je Punt” project, with the support of OpenStreetMap Belgium.

Pin Je Punt will collect data about benches, picnic tables, public toilets, playgrounds, charging stations for e-bikes, bicycle pumps and repair stations and touristic watchtowers.

The project runs on a MapComplete theme, a tool to make it easy to make thematic maps that run entirely on OpenStreetMap data. The themes are built to invite contributions back to OSM.

The data that was already available within the provinces, has been converted to Notes. That way, the data will be validated one by one. They appear on the regular OSM.org site and in Pin Je Punt.

The government agencies are doing this project to collect data that is available nowhere else for all of Flanders. By using OSM for data collection, the data will automatically flow to several data users. They will also set up services of their own to distribute to their usual re-users. During the process, Visit Flanders took the initiative to join us as a Corporate Member.

Try it out yourself, and let us know what you think! We’re also monitoring all the edits as they come in - and we could use your help with that.