Cleaning up German railway station metadata: the DMC effort

# What the DMC project is doing On 25 August 2026 a mapper using the name Hiki is railing began a focused cleanup of metadata for German railway stations. The immediate aim is practical: get track numbers and platform references into OpenStreetMap so clients like OpenRailwayMap (ORM) actually show them.

The work centers on two kinds of tags that affect rendering and usability: ref/local_ref on platforms and railway:track_ref on tracks. Many German stations were missing these or had low-quality platform geometry, often because initial imports or automated imports left gaps.

# How the team sources information The mapper reports using a mix of personal knowledge (having travelled widely in Germany using the Deutschlandticket) and public online frontends that display station track numbers. Primary online references mentioned are Bahnhof.de, the HAFAS system via DB Navigator (DBnav), and a site called bahnexperte. The stated approach is to verify station layouts against these public displays rather than indiscriminately copy structured data.

There is awareness of licensing concerns. The mapper says they did not originally expect data-rights issues with Bahnhof.de but are checking. For now they treat information as publicly visible facts (track numbers visible in person or on the web) and use those to confirm local knowledge.

# Project workflow and naming To reduce commit friction, the project adopted a simple changeset label convention: "DMC - [bahnhofname]" (DMC stands for Deutsche Bahn Metadatei Cleanup). This keeps each station's changeset compact and makes it easy to find edits related to this effort.

The mapper is working state by state. At the time of the diary posts, Schleswig-Holstein and Hamburg are the main focus, with more work ongoing. The mapper describes the concept of "done" as subjective in OSM, and anticipates iterative improvements to platform geometries and track lines beyond just adding numeric refs.

# Community reaction and suggested next steps

Bahnhof.de and other fronts and that the initial project was intentionally small and manual. They are open to scaling the effort by assigning mappers to federal states, but are cautious about automated nudges because tracks and station tracks are not always clearly differentiated in OSM tagging.

# Practical considerations for people who want to join or reproduce the approach

• Use direct observation where possible and confirm with public frontends (Bahnhof.de, DBnav, bahnexperte) rather than importing structured datasets until licensing is checked.
• Adopt the DMC changeset label to make edits discoverable: "DMC - [bahnhofname]".
• Work by federal state to divide labor and avoid overlap.
• Consider building an Overpass query to flag stations lacking ref/local_ref or railway:track_ref so volunteers have a ranked queue of tasks.

# Where this effort sits in the mapping ecosystem This is a focused, volunteer cleanup to improve practical usability of railway station data for routing and visualization tools. It addresses missing numeric metadata that affects how platforms and tracks are displayed and used in client applications. The mapper is balancing manual verification, public sources, and the need to coordinate more contributors if the project scales.