[Talk-ca] OpenStreetMap Americana - Announcing a new American map style and call for collaborators!

[Zeke Farwell]

Hello Neighbors,

Our new renderer project, OSM-Americana, has been mentioned several times
in the recent road classification thread, so I wanted to cross post
the announcement
made to the talk-us list
<https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-us/2022-January/021535.html>
here as well.  I'd also like to note that while custom highway shields for
Canada and Mexico have not been implemented yet, they are very much in
scope.  We want to make a great map of North America, not just the US.
Contributions are welcome!

--
Zeke Farwell
from Northern Vermont (aka southern Quebec)

On Wed, Jan 26, 2022 at 2:23 PM Brian M. Sperlongano <zelonewolf at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Hi Folks,
>
> I'm pleased to announce the kick-off of the OpenStreetMap Americana
> project, which aims to develop a new regional map style with cartographic
> practices that are familiar to users of maps published in the US.  We have
> a goal to eventually become a part of the OpenStreetMap US web site,
> similar to other local chapters in Europe and Asia.  This announcement
> serves as a notice that Americana is "open for business" and welcoming
> collaborators for a community-developed American-style map.
>
> Perhaps the most recognizable feature of North American maps is the
> drawing of our iconic highway shields.  After eight months of work on the
> underlying infrastructure, the team of Americana collaborators has deployed
> the first open-source vector-tile renderer to display location-specific,
> representative highway shields, including up to 6-way concurrencies,
> rendered along the path of a highway.  We are also rendering the expressway
> tag, which provides important mapper feedback to those working on the
> national highway classification project[1].
>
> While we have a working prototype[2] with these key features, the map is
> quite incomplete, and we have a lot of work ahead of us to finish rendering
> the broad range of general purpose map features, flesh out exactly what an
> "American style" map means, and make it perform well and look beautiful.  I
> invite all that are interested in collaborating on this new renderer for
> our national community to join us on Slack at #american-map-style,
> collaborate on our github[3] and check out our wiki page[4].
>
> At the risk of missing someone from this list, I would like to acknowledge
> everyone who had a hand in making this project a reality.  First, a thanks
> to Phil Gold[5] and subsequently Kevin Kenny[6], who inspired this project
> with the first Mapnik-based concurrent shield renderer starting back in
> 2013. Thanks to Zeke Farwell, Adam Franco, Josh Lee, and Martin Machyna for
> their work in building out the bulk of the code in this style, and to Ariel
> Kadouri for figuring out how to deploy it.  The technique for rendering
> concurrent shields in a line along the roadway using formatted text
> expressions is the brainchild of Minh Nguyễn, and Oliver Wipfli came up
> with the implementation[7] in MapLibre to allow shields to be rendered
> upright.  On the back end, thanks to the team at OpenMapTiles, who accepted
> over 50 PRs for features important to an American style.
>
> Lastly, thanks to the over 100 mappers dialed into our Slack channel,
> #american-map-style, who have participated in the many community
> discussions, made code or artwork contributions, and collaborated on the
> mapping and tagging fixes needed to the map itself to make this style
> possible.
>
> [1]
> https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/United_States/2021_Highway_Classification_Guidance
> [2] https://zelonewolf.github.io/openstreetmap-americana
> [3] https://github.com/ZeLonewolf/openstreetmap-americana
> [4] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OpenStreetMap_Americana
> [5] https://vimeo.com/68097487
> [6] https://kbk.is-a-geek.net/catskills/test4.html
> [7] https://github.com/maplibre/maplibre-gl-js/pull/716
>
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