[Talk-us-massachusetts] OSM US board / American map style

[Brian M. Sperlongano]

On Sun, Jan 29, 2023 at 1:10 AM Bill Ricker <bill.n1vux at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> we do control openstreetmap.us, and a community map style (OSM Americana)
>> is under active development.
>>
> From the previews I've seen, that *OSM Americana* style will be *great
> looking* !
> That's been an coming attraction for a while now.
>

Thanks! I appreciate the kind words, as it's been a labor of love for me,
and I think the other contributors would agree.


> Who's ponying up the render farm and tile-server to make OSM Americana the
> default style on a slippy map at *openstreetmap.us
> <http://openstreetmap.us>* ?
>

The answer is a bit complicated. The short answer is that I pay for the
tile server out of my own pocket.

However -- this is quite inexpensive, thanks to Mike Barry, who
incidentally is from Massachusetts. Recently, he published a Java library
called planetiler[1] which can render a planet vector tile server in about
40 minutes on high-end hardware (e.g., a machine with 64 cores and 128G RAM
is what I usually use). Once in a while (basically whenever we need to for
style development purposes), I spin up an AWS instance for a couple of
hours to download and patch a planet file and then render a new server.
This costs about $1 an hour, and I shut down the render server as soon as
I'm done.  The tile server [2] is cheap, like $10 a month for an AWS
t3.micro and $5 a month to store the ~80Gb rendered planet database. With
heavier usage, this is probably in inadequate hardware, but a tile server
usable for development is well within "less than my coffee habit" prices.

Standing up a permanent tile server with continuous updates (more
realistically, once every two hours or so) is a longer-term goal that I'm
working on in the background[3]. We (OSM US) have peripheral access to
and/or offers of computer hardware from time to time, and there are ongoing
discussions about how that could play into OSM Americana's future as a
project. But for now, occasional versus continuous updates aren't a blocker.

Also, there is work in progress to revamp the openstreetmap.us website,
which intends to include an Americana slippy map. Whether or not we're
willing to publish a slippy map before we have a tile server with
continuous updates is a bridge we'll have to cross.

Alas, OSM Americana will still not be the "standard" for viewing USA from
> easy to remember well publicized URLs like *osm.org <http://osm.org>*, as
> long as Carto owns "standard".  One holds little hope of Americana being
> added as a low down option with ÖPNVKarte at the bottom of the list. :-(
>

We are focusing on bringing the project to a production state and a more
permanent hosting situation. But once that's established, there's no reason
why we couldn't go through the process[5] to propose a new map style for
osm.org.  However, that's quite a ways down the road. The implied
suggestion that "a user sees their locally-appropriate style" is certainly
an interesting idea, and it's not the first time someone has suggested it.
Of course, until the French style gets officially added to osm.org, there
aren't any explicitly regional styles on osm.org to even have that
discussion. Showcasing regional differences in cartography would be a neat
thing for the global project. I hope more community efforts pop up to
create locally-inspired cartography.

The standard tile layer (osm-carto) is a great way to showcase the
available data in the OSM database, but it's oddly foreign-looking to an
American, with the lack of highway shields being the biggest oddity.
There's long-running[6] work on that project to add highway shields to the
map, though at 8 years and running, it remains to be seen how long it'll
take to get there.

(If your board has any influence with *OsmAnd* (and any other major apps)
> at all, convincing them to offer Americana as a style when the view is in
> USA would be excellent.)
>

The key blocker to this is technical, not political. While we've just
recently started publishing a style.json, the highway shields are rendered
in javascript code, on the fly, in the user's web browser. To support
mobile/native, we need to create a native library that replicates all the
shield drawing code. So we could render "everything except the shields"
today, but there's a lot of work to get to where a native app could use it
(shameless plug - if anyone has those skills - help wanted!).

My general feeling is that "if we build it, they will come". We made the
project CC0 (dedication to public domain) to maximize who might end up
using it. A style familiar to an American audience is certainly of high
interest to any service with switchable map styles.

[1] https://github.com/onthegomap/planetiler
[2] https://6ug7hetxl9.execute-api.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/
[3]
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/179BUCDmaBKxhSGFagGHkDKGg1dD2uLQjVLJjtGpWGTk
[4] https://github.com/ZeLonewolf/openstreetmap-americana/issues/692
[5]
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Featured_tile_layers/Guidelines_for_new_tile_layers
[6] https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/issues/508
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