OMB

I’m going to jump on the band waggon and say thanks to OSM’s Cartography Crew, who slogged it out before the Oxford meet up a couple of weeks ago and have re-vamped OSM’s cartography. The map tile show belown is produced using the Mapnik rendering engine – an open source (LGPL) GIS library that makes boring databases fun colourful. The downside of Mapnik is the 873 lines (and growing) of XML needed to produce the map. Hacking this level of config isn’t that much fun, so thanks again to those who took the time to work on it.

Central London, as seen in the OSM Slippy Map

If cartography like this isn’t enough to get you going, just think how far we’ve come. When I first found OSM a year ago, the map looked like this:

OSM – One year ago

So now we have Open geo-data that in certain areas rivals the completeness and even the existence of proprietary data. With this data, we can use a Free software library to make maps that look better than most of the other maps you see on the internet. Maybe there’s something in the whole ‘open’ thing then after all?

You want contours? We do contours too:

Produced by Robert Hart using Osmarender

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 15th, 2007 at 7:21 pm and is filed under Cartography, Free, Geodata, Opensource, Openstreetmap. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.