Open Source Maps

[Casio Bauman]

Wehave prepared a set of beautiful Open Map Styles

for our vector tiles. The styles are free and open-source,

and you can adapt the design and code for your project

or commercial product however you like.

Our new Vector Tile Schema is encoding the

cartography decisions made on top of OpenStreetMap,

Natural Earth and other OpenData sources and is 100% open

and free to use, extend or build upon.

Every year on the third Wednesday of November, map geeks around the world (myself included) celebrate GIS Day. Short for geographic information systems, or occasionally geospatial information science, GIS is all about using computer systems to collect, store, analyze, and display geographic data, or really any data that has a spatial component.

The past decade has changed GIS immensely. With the advent of data mining, machine learning, mobile applications, the Internet of Things, social media, and other recent additions to the computing landscape, there are orders of magnitude more data available across every discipline, and the race to do useful and interesting things is in full throttle. Once limited to more traditional realms like land records, agriculture, natural resources, and urban planning, GIS now permeates practically every field.

Many people familiar with Google Maps immediately turn to the Google Maps API for getting started, but Google Maps are far from the only option. In fact, there are many open source alternatives which are better fit to specific needs, whether those needs are displaying something very basic with minimal overhead, or a complex application with many diverse components and integrations.

Leaflet has in the past couple of years become one of the most popular options for creating interactive JavaScript maps. It's basic library is fairly small, making Leaflet a great option for mobile applications or other situations in which load time or size is at a premium. But it also has a ton of available plugins so that you can add on just about any functionality available with a heaftier mapping library.

Leaflet also has a strong documentation project behind it, making it a good choice for beginners, and there are a number of community-contributed examples out there on the Internet for when you get stuck, as well as many examples on the project homepage. Leaflet's source code is available on GitHub and it is licensed under a BSD license.

Though Leaflet can be considered a minimalist library, Modest Maps may win an award for being even smaller. Also very modular in design, Modest Maps is a great choice for both simple maps and for people who wish to pick-and-choose components. Check out their example library for more ideas of what you might do with it.

Polymaps is a JavaScript mapping library for creating interactive maps with both SVG-based vectors as well as tile-based maps for raster data. The nice thing about using SVG (scalable vector graphics) for creating maps is that it means that many of the same styling options which can be applied to web documents with CSS will also work with your map design. I also find that Polymaps handles zooming incredibly well compared to some other libraries

Of course, the three we looked at aren't the only options. There are many others, and depending on what your specific needs are, you should probably spend some time exploring all of the options before making a decison of where to get started. Some others I like include:

The nice thing about using these libraries is that they encourage mixing and matching to style maps perfectly for your needs. Don't like the default map layer which sits underneath your map? Pick a different one. Prefer a different icon for representing points on your map? No problem.

Hi Hugo, OpenStreetMap is a collaborative editing project and a provider of data, not an API for displaying the map itself. Any of these three web mapping APIs highlighted here are capable of using OpenStreetMap data as a basemap for a user-created map.

Opensource.com aspires to publish all content under a Creative Commons license but may not be able to do so in all cases. You are responsible for ensuring that you have the necessary permission to reuse any work on this site. Red Hat and the Red Hat logo are trademarks of Red Hat, Inc., registered in the United States and other countries.

Protomaps is a self-funded, solo developer project with a mission to make interactive cartography accessible to hobbyists and organizations of all sizes. An essential part of that mission is publishing open source software under commercial-friendly licenses.

OpenStreetMap (OSM) is a free, open geographic database updated and maintained by a community of volunteers via open collaboration. Contributors collect data from surveys, trace from aerial imagery and also import from other freely licensed geodata sources. OpenStreetMap is freely licensed under the Open Database License and as a result commonly used to make electronic maps, inform turn-by-turn navigation, assist in humanitarian aid and data visualisation. OpenStreetMap uses its own topology to store geographical features which can then be exported into other GIS file formats. The OpenStreetMap website itself is an online map, geodata search engine and editor.

OpenStreetMap was created by Steve Coast in response to the Ordnance Survey, the United Kingdom's national mapping agency, failing to release its data to the public under free licences in 2004. Initially, maps were created only via GPS traces, but it was quickly populated by importing public domain geographical data such as the U.S. TIGER and by tracing permitted aerial photography or satellite imagery. OpenStreetMap's adoption was accelerated by Google Maps's introduction of pricing in 2012 and the development of supporting software and applications.

Steve Coast founded the project in 2004 while at a university in Britain, initially focusing on mapping the United Kingdom.[3] In the UK and elsewhere, government-run and tax-funded projects like the Ordnance Survey created massive datasets but declined to freely and widely distribute them. The first contribution was made in London in 2005.[4][non-primary source needed] In April 2006, the OpenStreetMap Foundation was established to encourage the growth, development and distribution of free geospatial data and provide geospatial data for anybody to use and share.

In 2012, the launch of pricing for Google Maps led several prominent websites to switch from their service to OpenStreetMap and other competitors.[17] Chief among these were Foursquare and Craigslist, which adopted OpenStreetMap, and Apple, which ended a contract with Google and launched a self-built mapping platform using TomTom and OpenStreetMap data.[18]

The OpenStreetMap data primitives are stored and processed in different formats. OpenStreetMap server uses PostgreSQL database, with one table for each data primitive, with individual objects stored as rows.[21][22] From this, several database dumps are created, which are available for download. The complete dump is called planet.osm. These dumps exist in two formats, one using XML and one using the Protocol Buffer Binary Format (PBF).[citation needed]

OpenStreetMap data and derived tiles were originally published under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike licence (CC BY-SA) with the intention of promoting free use and redistribution of the data.

In September 2012, the licence was changed to the Open Database Licence (ODbL) published by Open Data Commons (ODC) in order to define its bearing on data rather than representation more specifically.[23][24] As part of this relicensing process, some of the map data was removed from the public distribution. This included all data contributed by members that did not agree to the new licensing terms, as well as all subsequent edits to those affected objects. It also included any data contributed based on input data that was not compatible with the new terms.

Estimates suggested that over 97% of data would be retained globally, but certain regions would be affected more than others, such as in Australia where 24 to 84% of objects would be retained, depending on the type of object.[25] Ultimately, more than 99% of the data was retained, with Australia and Poland being the countries most severely affected by the change.[26]

All data added to the project needs to have a licence compatible with the Open Database Licence. This can include out-of-copyright information, public domain or other licences. Software used in the production and presentation of OpenStreetMap data may have separate licensing terms.

Map tiles provided by the OpenStreetMap project were licensed under CC-BY-SA-2.0 until 1 August 2020. The ODbL license requires attribution to be attached to maps produced from OpenStreetMap data, but does not require that any particular license be applied to those maps. "OpenStreetMap Contributors" with link to ODbL copyright page as attribution requirement is used on the site.[27]

Map data is collected by ground survey, personal knowledge, digitizing from imagery, and government data. Ground survey data is collected by volunteers traditionally using tools such as a handheld GPS unit, a notebook, digital camera and voice recorder.

Software applications on smartphones (mobile devices) have made it easy for anybody to survey. The data is then entered into the OpenStreetMap database using a number of software tools including JOSM and Merkaator.[28]

The availability of aerial photography and other data from commercial and government sources has added important sources of data for manual editing and automated imports. Special processes are in place to handle automated imports and avoid legal and technical problems.

Once the data has been collected, it is entered into the database by uploading it onto the project's website together with appropriate attribute data. As collecting and uploading data may be separated from editing objects, contribution to the project is possible without using a GPS unit, e.g. by using Paper mapping.

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