OSMyBiz - Company profile editor for OpenStreetMap

OpenStreetMap My Business (OSMyBiz) is an editor for the collaborative, open-mapping project OpenStreetMap (OSM). It focuses on enabling users to edit businesses on OSM without requiring knowledge about how OSM organises its data, specifically targeting new or inexperienced users. OSMyBiz got created in 2018 as a bachelor thesis project. Since then, it has only gotten minor updates and needs to catch up regarding technologies.

Since its creation, new version changes have been available for nearly all dependencies, and some are not even maintained. There have also been significant changes in the tooling used in modern web applications. OSMyBiz did not get optimised for mobile, and therefore, the usage on mobile devices was suboptimal. One of the external APIs used implemented rate-limiting, which caused constant error messages when moving around on the map. Additionally, the application has a growing list of issues and suggestions.

The application was brought up to date by migrating from Vue 2 to Vue 3, replacing Vuex with Pinia, switching from webpack to Vite and introducing TypeScript. The existing application got reworked to be responsive in a "mobile-first" approach. A caching mechanism was added to the application to reduce the load on the public overpass API instances. The implementation reduces unnecessary load on the shared infrastructure and improves user experience by reducing issues due to rate-limiting.

There are still multiple open issues, ideas and optimisation potential for OSMyBiz. This project has created a solid foundation to implement those further development options. All while ensuring better maintainability and making it simpler to modify the frontend code base.