JOSM — The Complete Guide: Free OpenStreetMap Editing for Road Networks and Infrastructure

JOSM (Java OpenStreetMap Editor) is the advanced desktop editor of the OpenStreetMap community. It lets you draw and correct roads, junctions, buildings and infrastructure over aerial imagery, import GPS tracks and work with large data sets.

JOSM

OpenStreetMap community

Advanced OpenStreetMap editor — roads, buildings and infrastructure, with GPS and aerial imagery import.

Get it from the vendor

What you get

Precise editing — geometry and tags: road class, number of lanes, turn restrictions and speed limits.
Background layers — aerial imagery and GPS tracks as a basis for drawing.
Validator — finding disconnected roads, overlaps and conflicting tags before saving.
Plugins — tools for buildings, public transport and working with local files.
Offline work — editing a local OSM file without uploading to the server.

Engineering use and data licensing

Transport planners use JOSM to clean a road network before importing it into SUMO or MATSim, and to update base maps. The software itself is free (GPL). OpenStreetMap data is under the ODbL licence, which requires attribution and sharing changes to the database; editing the public map also means following community rules, for example not copying from copyrighted maps.

Related tools

For traffic simulation on the network — SUMO. For routes and travel-time matrices — OSRM. To display the data and combine it with other layers — QGIS.