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

Brian M. Sperlongano zelonewolf at gmail.com
Wed Jan 26 19:19:20 UTC 2022


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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