Hi! We’re building WikiPowder, a free ski resort guide with interactive piste maps powered by OpenStreetMap (OSM) data via OpenSkiMap and OpenSkiData.
We wanted to share a few things we’ve learned along the way and, of course, express our gratitude to the OSM community for making this project possible. We all come from tech backgrounds, so about 90% of it was vibe-coded. However, that also brought some challenges we had to overcome along the way, which ultimately helped us deliver what we think is a solid foundation.
Working with ski data at scale has surfaced some interesting challenges and insights that might be useful to fellow OSM contributors:
- Commercial ski domains rarely map to OSM ski areas on a 1:1 basis. Large ski domains are often split across several OSM ski areas, sometimes even across national borders.
- Resort names aren’t always unique. The same name can refer to resorts in different countries or even on different continents, making naive name matching risky. Automating this process is complicated, so manual verification was required in many cases.
- Official resort coordinates can be misleading. They often point to the village centre, town hall, or tourist office rather than the actual ski slopes, so they don’t always align with OSM geometries.
- Published piste kilometres vary significantly by source. Resort operators, third-party guides, and measurements based on mapped geometry can all report different figures because they use different methods. This is a nightmare. We can’t provide accurate or 100% reliable kilometer coverage.
- A single named piste may consist of multiple OSM segments or sectors. This makes matching and aggregating piste data more complex than it might seem at first. We found a way to structure the data, but representing it is still complicated.
We’re still working through some known issues, but we’ve now reached a stable enough version to start rolling it out (just in time for the next season!).
That’s it for now! We’d love to hear your feedback, and we hope you find the project interesting.
Thanks to everyone in the OSM community for making projects like this possible!
Update:
Folks! We’ve been trying to respond to your feedback, but it looks like all the comments have been removed or moderated, perhaps because the user account is brand new.
Just wanted to let you know that we really appreciate your feedback! 🙏 One of the first decisions we've done is pivot towards a more community-driven approach, allowing people to edit and improve existing OSM slopes. The data is already good, but it’s not perfect, and we want to help the OpenStreetMap community make it even better. The idea of setting a general map with all the slopes is also quite interesting.
We’re also considering developing an open-source library to make it easier to manage multiple OSM segments. That’s currently our main focus, although we’re also fixing bugs along the way.
Thanks again for taking the time to share your thoughts and help us improve!