[OSM-talk] About OSM social implications and what can/should be displayed on the map (or not)

Richard Fairhurst richard at systemed.net
Fri Jun 29 16:13:51 UTC 2018


Carlos Cámara wrote:
> Willing to read your points of view on that matter.

There is a whole lot I could say on this (writing "Eurocentric" in a
discussion about casinos seems really weird, and I'm not sure Native
Americans would thank you for it) but ultimately it's a little academic at
the moment.

At present we are prisoners of the technology we use. That is raster tiles
and they simply don't scale to offering multiple views of the world. So
unless you believe there is one true map (there isn't) then this issue is
always going to come up.

Moving to vector tiles will bring OSM's true potential front and centre: a
million different views of the one dataset.[1] The barrier for creating your
own map view of the world moves from a seriously difficult toolchain and an
arcane styling language, to a simple "bring your own style" with a friendly
WYSIWYG editor[2]. It's not even infeasible that, one day, individual OSM
users could save their own stylesheets somewhere on osm.org, fork and share
them with others. The possibilities are endless, and endlessly delightful.

That is where to focus our energies - not on mithering around the dying
technology of raster tiles.

Richard

[1] assuming a comprehensive selection of tags is encoded into the tiles at
large scale, but that's entirely plausible
[2] https://github.com/maputnik/editor



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