8 ms·

The current state of map design in OpenStreetMap

218 points by altilunium 3y ago

zetalemur 2y ago
Interesting read - there's a lot of progress in the open map styling scene and OSM maps with good data can make amazing maps and it has many different features [0]. It's also interesting to make maps directly from raw data (in this case that would be aerial imagery with mostly elevation data). E.g. if you find good training data you can easily make "land-cover" maps and although my example (of Austria) [1] does not have annotations (addresses, etc.), it's still nice to look at and has the benefit of being extremely compressible (compared to aerial raw imagery). [0] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Map_features https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Map_features [1] https://turmfalke.httpd.app/test.html https://turmfalke.httpd.app/test.html
orangesite 2y ago
So nice to see OSM still continuing to care about maps after Google abandoned their last remaining pretensions to cartography in favor of the almighty advertising dollar.
The_Colonel 2y ago
I know this is subjective, but I dislike most of the contemporary map design. Google Map is atrocious, the recent update to the color scheme is even worse. OpenStreetMap is at least information dense, and seems to have somewhat improved, but still doesn't look good to my eyes. Fuzzy text, ugly color palette (even if better than Google Maps). The one I kinda like is mapy.cz which I tend to use for hiking: https://de.mapy.cz/turisticka?x=13.1100771&y=47.1737326&z=16 https://de.mapy.cz/turisticka?x=13.1100771&y=47.1737326&z=16
- kibwen 2y ago
  > penStreetMap is at least information dense, and seems to have somewhat improved, but still doesn't look good to my eyes. I want to make sure people are aware that there's many different map designs on OpenStreetMap.org, and all of them (for better or worse) are quite aesthetically different from each other. Check out https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=14/42.3580/-71.0725 https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=14/42.3580/-71.0725 and click the "Layers" button on the right to see a list (with previews) of each alternative design.
  - Freak_NL 2y ago
    Also don't forget about apps like OrganicMaps and OsmAnd, which bring their own styles and technology, and, of course, downloadable off-line maps. For people on Android: get OsmAnd~ from F-Droid instead of Google's app store, and enjoy the unlimited version for free (alternatively: use the freemium version from Google Play, or pay for it).
    - wkat4242 2y ago
      Yeah I love OSMAnd especially since its new 3D mode. Which is really useful in my area that is far from flat. A normal map doesn't really work here even with contour lines.
    - rabf 2y ago
      Got it for free at first, soon after paid for it. Love how customisable OsmAnd is, most maping programs are very much tailored to drivers, which is not my use case.
  - kiicia 2y ago
    but most uses of osm are leaving default scheme, like public transport, embeded maps etc and defaulr osm scheme is bad to say the least
  - 1oooqooq 2y ago
    they are not easily available on osmand~ for example, no Americana style.
p0w3n3d 2y ago
One company recently had some incident because their client had no possibility to choose the delivery location. Apparently someone changed the openstreetmaps which they're using on their page, in the way that their customer's street was renamed to some bad words on Andy Townsend
- RicoElectrico 2y ago
  Sorry, I don't buy this. The vandalism only persisted in the rendered map tiles due to CDN caching. Actual map data (which is input to the geocoding) was reverted very quickly by the DWG (moderators). This is also possibly a violation of Tile Usage Policy, you're not supposed to use OSM infrastructure in volume. OSM data is free, but hosting not so. Either self-host or use other providers.
- Freak_NL 2y ago
  Yeah, there was a bad bit of vandalism recently. The data was quickly restored though. This is not too different from vandalism on Wikipedia, but instead of facts getting mangled, navigation can be impacted. Odd that that company hit one of the bits of map which was impacted though; the chance of anyone actually hitting the bad data seems quite small (as in, lottery jackpot winning small).
  - idoubtit 2y ago
    > the chance of anyone actually hitting the bad data seems quite small (as in, lottery jackpot winning small). I saw it on a small cycling site that uses OSM's tiles. I was surprised and checked OSM's site for this French back-country and a few random places, and the offensive messages were still there. Even if the vandalism was purged after a few (dozens of) minutes, I suppose there were more witnesses across this short period than winners of lottery jackpots across this century.
    - p0w3n3d 2y ago
      If company runs 24/7 deliveries it's really not hard to hit the vandalized time interval
Freak_NL 2y ago
Note that the author of this piece is also directly responsible for blocking the acceptance of many new features in Carto, including community-developed and broadly accepted features like highway=busway: https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/issues/4226 https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/issues/4... Carto is of course just one style for OpenStreetMap, but it is also the default style shown on openstreetmap.org, with direct support from the operational team (server resources etc.). If a high-profile feature is not rendered by Carto, gaps show up all over the world where people use Carto-based screenshots, etc., and of course on openstreetmap.org. The stagnation of Carto, and thus openstreetmap.org, the website, is one of the major pain points for many mappers and developers in the OSM community, including myself. (It also highlighted the failure of the OpenStreetMap Foundation to deal with this situation, although the recent move to develop a successor vector style is somewhat hopeful). Personally, this makes me very hesitant to consider anything Christoph Hormann writes regarding OpenStreetMap in a positive light.
- RicoElectrico 2y ago
  Agree! Outsiders sadly wouldn't have experienced this first-hand. The thing is, PR acceptance criteria aren't even firm. If imagico after a long back-and-forth decides he doesn't like it, then too bad for the prospective contributor. A similar situation holds with openstreetmap-website. Sadly currently barely anyone uses Rails...
  - Macha 2y ago
    Honestly even reading his prior blog post and this together, his own outline of his position made me feel there was more to it. Like the way I read it, they had a process of open contribution, and then they closed it down, partly at the author's suggestion, and then those contributors who felt the process was too onerous because of pushback against perceived euro-centrism of their contributions went and made their own projects.... which were more succesful for Europe and North America.
    - ozim 2y ago
wcedmisten 2y ago
> But it is also visible, that despite Americana being a relatively young and not yet feature complete project by its own goals, it already struggles significantly with the technical limitations of the map rendering framework used and the commercially developed data schema it is built on. I wonder what goals of Americana the author feels are fallen short? [1] > The purpose of the Americana project is to: * Promote collaboration and shared purpose in the American mapping community * Express the American experience through cartography, taking inspiration from the familiar features of North American paper maps * Close technology gaps that impede the use of American cartographic principles. Where the technology to build our map doesn't exist, we will build it. [1]: https://github.com/osm-americana https://github.com/osm-americana
- RicoElectrico 2y ago
  He's talking about the OpenMapTiles vector tiles schema.
breadwinner 2y ago
AAA maps are very legible. Here are some examples: https://www.aaa.com/aaa/common/mapgallery/pa/philadelphia.pdf https://www.aaa.com/aaa/common/mapgallery/pa/philadelphia.pd... https://www.aaa.com/aaa/common/mapgallery/ma/bostonandvicinity.pdf https://www.aaa.com/aaa/common/mapgallery/ma/bostonandvicini... https://www.aaa.com/aaa/common/mapgallery/or/portlandandvicinity.pdf https://www.aaa.com/aaa/common/mapgallery/or/portlandandvici... https://www.aaa.com/aaa/common/mapgallery/dc/washingtondcandvicinity.pdf https://www.aaa.com/aaa/common/mapgallery/dc/washingtondcand... https://www.aaa.com/aaa/common/mapgallery/ny/newyorkvicinity.pdf https://www.aaa.com/aaa/common/mapgallery/ny/newyorkvicinity...
- aendruk 2y ago
  Largely what permits this clarity is that these maps are specialized to one application, in this case highway driving. The OpenStreetMap renderers similarly specialized to e.g. highway driving, public transport, cycling, hiking, etc. also have this benefit.
  - habi 2y ago
    https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OpenStreetMap_Americana https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OpenStreetMap_Americana comes top mind: See https://zelonewolf.github.io/openstreetmap-americana/ https://zelonewolf.github.io/openstreetmap-americana/
    - flomo 2y ago
      Very nice looking in my american eyes
    - kivle 2y ago
      Nice for driving, but not for walking. Look how much pedestrian info is simply not rendered in my home area. Tons of stairs and walkways are not visible: https://zelonewolf.github.io/openstreetmap-americana/#map=16.61/58.972561/5.728156 https://zelonewolf.github.io/openstreetmap-americana/#map=16... https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=17/58.97226/5.72803&layers=PN https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=17/58.97226/5.72803&layer...

218 points by altilunium 3y ago

Interesting read - there's a lot of progress in the open map styling scene and OSM maps with good data can make amazing maps and it has many different features [0]. It's also interesting to make maps directly from raw data (in this case that would be aerial imagery with mostly elevation data). E.g. if you find good training data you can easily make "land-cover" maps and although my example (of Austria) [1] does not have annotations (addresses, etc.), it's still nice to look at and has the benefit of being extremely compressible (compared to aerial raw imagery). [0] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Map_features https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Map_features [1] https://turmfalke.httpd.app/test.html https://turmfalke.httpd.app/test.html

orangesite 2y ago

So nice to see OSM still continuing to care about maps after Google abandoned their last remaining pretensions to cartography in favor of the almighty advertising dollar.

The_Colonel 2y ago

I know this is subjective, but I dislike most of the contemporary map design. Google Map is atrocious, the recent update to the color scheme is even worse. OpenStreetMap is at least information dense, and seems to have somewhat improved, but still doesn't look good to my eyes. Fuzzy text, ugly color palette (even if better than Google Maps). The one I kinda like is mapy.cz which I tend to use for hiking: https://de.mapy.cz/turisticka?x=13.1100771&y=47.1737326&z=16 https://de.mapy.cz/turisticka?x=13.1100771&y=47.1737326&z=16

kibwen 2y ago
> penStreetMap is at least information dense, and seems to have somewhat improved, but still doesn't look good to my eyes. I want to make sure people are aware that there's many different map designs on OpenStreetMap.org, and all of them (for better or worse) are quite aesthetically different from each other. Check out https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=14/42.3580/-71.0725 https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=14/42.3580/-71.0725 and click the "Layers" button on the right to see a list (with previews) of each alternative design.
- Freak_NL 2y ago
  Also don't forget about apps like OrganicMaps and OsmAnd, which bring their own styles and technology, and, of course, downloadable off-line maps. For people on Android: get OsmAnd~ from F-Droid instead of Google's app store, and enjoy the unlimited version for free (alternatively: use the freemium version from Google Play, or pay for it).
  - wkat4242 2y ago
    Yeah I love OSMAnd especially since its new 3D mode. Which is really useful in my area that is far from flat. A normal map doesn't really work here even with contour lines.
  - rabf 2y ago
    Got it for free at first, soon after paid for it. Love how customisable OsmAnd is, most maping programs are very much tailored to drivers, which is not my use case.
- kiicia 2y ago
  but most uses of osm are leaving default scheme, like public transport, embeded maps etc and defaulr osm scheme is bad to say the least
- 1oooqooq 2y ago
  they are not easily available on osmand~ for example, no Americana style.

p0w3n3d 2y ago

One company recently had some incident because their client had no possibility to choose the delivery location. Apparently someone changed the openstreetmaps which they're using on their page, in the way that their customer's street was renamed to some bad words on Andy Townsend

RicoElectrico 2y ago
Sorry, I don't buy this. The vandalism only persisted in the rendered map tiles due to CDN caching. Actual map data (which is input to the geocoding) was reverted very quickly by the DWG (moderators). This is also possibly a violation of Tile Usage Policy, you're not supposed to use OSM infrastructure in volume. OSM data is free, but hosting not so. Either self-host or use other providers.
Freak_NL 2y ago
Yeah, there was a bad bit of vandalism recently. The data was quickly restored though. This is not too different from vandalism on Wikipedia, but instead of facts getting mangled, navigation can be impacted. Odd that that company hit one of the bits of map which was impacted though; the chance of anyone actually hitting the bad data seems quite small (as in, lottery jackpot winning small).
- idoubtit 2y ago
  > the chance of anyone actually hitting the bad data seems quite small (as in, lottery jackpot winning small). I saw it on a small cycling site that uses OSM's tiles. I was surprised and checked OSM's site for this French back-country and a few random places, and the offensive messages were still there. Even if the vandalism was purged after a few (dozens of) minutes, I suppose there were more witnesses across this short period than winners of lottery jackpots across this century.
  - p0w3n3d 2y ago
    If company runs 24/7 deliveries it's really not hard to hit the vandalized time interval

Freak_NL 2y ago

Note that the author of this piece is also directly responsible for blocking the acceptance of many new features in Carto, including community-developed and broadly accepted features like highway=busway: https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/issues/4226 https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/issues/4... Carto is of course just one style for OpenStreetMap, but it is also the default style shown on openstreetmap.org, with direct support from the operational team (server resources etc.). If a high-profile feature is not rendered by Carto, gaps show up all over the world where people use Carto-based screenshots, etc., and of course on openstreetmap.org. The stagnation of Carto, and thus openstreetmap.org, the website, is one of the major pain points for many mappers and developers in the OSM community, including myself. (It also highlighted the failure of the OpenStreetMap Foundation to deal with this situation, although the recent move to develop a successor vector style is somewhat hopeful). Personally, this makes me very hesitant to consider anything Christoph Hormann writes regarding OpenStreetMap in a positive light.

RicoElectrico 2y ago
Agree! Outsiders sadly wouldn't have experienced this first-hand. The thing is, PR acceptance criteria aren't even firm. If imagico after a long back-and-forth decides he doesn't like it, then too bad for the prospective contributor. A similar situation holds with openstreetmap-website. Sadly currently barely anyone uses Rails...
- Macha 2y ago
  Honestly even reading his prior blog post and this together, his own outline of his position made me feel there was more to it. Like the way I read it, they had a process of open contribution, and then they closed it down, partly at the author's suggestion, and then those contributors who felt the process was too onerous because of pushback against perceived euro-centrism of their contributions went and made their own projects.... which were more succesful for Europe and North America.
  - ozim 2y ago

wcedmisten 2y ago

> But it is also visible, that despite Americana being a relatively young and not yet feature complete project by its own goals, it already struggles significantly with the technical limitations of the map rendering framework used and the commercially developed data schema it is built on. I wonder what goals of Americana the author feels are fallen short? [1] > The purpose of the Americana project is to: * Promote collaboration and shared purpose in the American mapping community * Express the American experience through cartography, taking inspiration from the familiar features of North American paper maps * Close technology gaps that impede the use of American cartographic principles. Where the technology to build our map doesn't exist, we will build it. [1]: https://github.com/osm-americana https://github.com/osm-americana

RicoElectrico 2y ago
He's talking about the OpenMapTiles vector tiles schema.

breadwinner 2y ago

AAA maps are very legible. Here are some examples: https://www.aaa.com/aaa/common/mapgallery/pa/philadelphia.pdf https://www.aaa.com/aaa/common/mapgallery/pa/philadelphia.pd... https://www.aaa.com/aaa/common/mapgallery/ma/bostonandvicinity.pdf https://www.aaa.com/aaa/common/mapgallery/ma/bostonandvicini... https://www.aaa.com/aaa/common/mapgallery/or/portlandandvicinity.pdf https://www.aaa.com/aaa/common/mapgallery/or/portlandandvici... https://www.aaa.com/aaa/common/mapgallery/dc/washingtondcandvicinity.pdf https://www.aaa.com/aaa/common/mapgallery/dc/washingtondcand... https://www.aaa.com/aaa/common/mapgallery/ny/newyorkvicinity.pdf https://www.aaa.com/aaa/common/mapgallery/ny/newyorkvicinity...

aendruk 2y ago
Largely what permits this clarity is that these maps are specialized to one application, in this case highway driving. The OpenStreetMap renderers similarly specialized to e.g. highway driving, public transport, cycling, hiking, etc. also have this benefit.
- habi 2y ago
  https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OpenStreetMap_Americana https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OpenStreetMap_Americana comes top mind: See https://zelonewolf.github.io/openstreetmap-americana/ https://zelonewolf.github.io/openstreetmap-americana/
  - flomo 2y ago
    Very nice looking in my american eyes
  - kivle 2y ago
    Nice for driving, but not for walking. Look how much pedestrian info is simply not rendered in my home area. Tons of stairs and walkways are not visible: https://zelonewolf.github.io/openstreetmap-americana/#map=16.61/58.972561/5.728156 https://zelonewolf.github.io/openstreetmap-americana/#map=16... https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=17/58.97226/5.72803&layers=PN https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=17/58.97226/5.72803&layer...