Facebook is releasing a complete, downloadable preview of OpenStreetMap data we plan to start using in a number of our public maps.

📥 Download Daylight Map Distribution right now in OpenStreetMap PBF format: 📦 planet-v0.1.osm.pbf (42GB).

At Facebook, we use maps to let our users find friends, businesses, groups and much more. OpenStreetMap (OSM), the open source wiki map, has a substantial global footprint of map data built and maintained by a dedicated community of global mappers making OSM a natural choice for Facebook.

Every day, OSM receives millions of contributions from the community. Some of these contributions may have intentional and unintentional edits that are incompatible with our use cases. Our mapping teams work to scrub these contributions for consistency and quality. In the course of this work, we also build additional tools and technologies on top of OSM.

OSM is a complex data product. Many tools, services, and companies have been created to make it full-featured. We’ve always developed our OSM-related tools with the hope that our approach to keeping maps current and accurate for our own use cases may also benefit others in the OSM community. To that end, we’re pleased to announce the release of the Daylight Map Distribution, one of our internal OSM datasets scrubbed to meet the quality standards of our wide-ranging products.

What’s Included in the Daylight Map Distribution:

• This planet file is composed of 100% OSM data, released under the terms of the Open Database License
• We’ve checked public OSM changes contained in the distribution, and allowed only those which have been validated to contain no malicious vandalism to prevent it from being shown to our users in our display maps
• This is currently a one-time release, and we’re looking for feedback from the community to decide on a useful cadence for future releases
• We publish the data in PBF format, a common binary format universally supported by OSM tools and already used for planet-scale file distribution

How we use OSM

We use maps made with OSM across Facebook to show people, events, and places:

Intentional, and possibly malicious edits range from headline-grabbing hate speech to outdated names. Some examples include:

• In 2018 New York City’s name was very briefly replaced by a racist epithet
• We found and corrected the real name of Ohio’s Shelby Hills Early Childhood Center, which previously contained the word “Retarded” from an earlier import from GNIS

Other bad edits include geometry errors and small instances of grafitti. Here are some samples of minor and unintentional bad edits:

• We held back an edit to a portion of the Euphrates River multipolygon which damaged its appearance on the map; at the same time we fixed the relation in OSM for all users

• Small-scale bad edits we find include cartoon characters like these two critters
• Large-scale bad edits include this recent flooding of large portions of South America on the Humanitarian map style, an instance of a particularly large and complex multipolygon relation

OSM forms a critical part of how our users interact with the world around them and our hope is that this release will make it easier for others to benefit from our work ensuring that it’s appropriate for display and free of vandalism. Through our use of OSM, we’ve encountered a variety of issues and inconsistencies and we’ve included fixes in our release of the Daylight Distribution. We also contribute these fixes back to OSM for the benefit of the larger community.

Working in Open Source

Our approach toward creating the Daylight Map Distribution was inspired by the success of the Linux operating system: starting with a pair of experts-only floppy disks in early 1991, user demand along with a liberal software license led to an explosion of ”distros,” curated collections of software that could be readily installed by casual users. The first Linux distribution was created less than a year later at the Manchester Computing Centre in February 1992. Today there are hundreds of distros including major products like Red Hat and Ubuntu. Distributors optimize for different uses making it easy and safe to use Linux on servers, laptops, phones, tablets, hardware hacking platforms, virtual machines, distributed systems, and embedded devices.

Consistent with the spirit of OSM, it is our hope that the Daylight Map Distribution (and subsequent iterations) will inspire individuals and companies to release their own datasets under open data licenses as well.

With the Daylight Map Distribution, we also hope to showcase all that is possible with a stable, efficient community-drive mapping effort. Open source is by its nature inclusive and welcoming to all. No contribution is too small or too large and we’re proud to stand together with every OSM contributor as we work toward shared goals of improving OSM and mapping the world.

How To Reach The Team

If you have any questions about this data distribution, we have created a #daylightdistro_feedback Slack channel in OSM US. Members of the team will be there periodically to answer questions. You can also email the team at osm@fb.com.

Learn more about the technology behind our process from our engineering team:

• MaRS: How Facebook keeps maps current and accurate post on Facebook’s Engineering blog, Sep 30, 2019
• “Keepin’ it fresh (and good)!” - Continuous Ingestion of OSM Data at Facebook presentation at OSM State Of The Map US conference, Sep 8, 2019

This release is just a sneak peek preview. We plan to start using this version of the data in our public maps soon, but you can start using it today. Download Daylight Map Distribution right now in OpenStreetMap PBF format:

• 📦 planet-v0.1.osm.pbf (42GB) – Complete Daylight v0.1 in OSM PBF format
• 🥡 planet-2020-03-06_v0.1.osc.bz2 (4.8GB) – changes from OSM.org Planet as of 2020-03-06 to Daylight v0.1

If you’re interested in engineering and other roles working on OpenStreetMap at Facebook, get in touch!