OpenStreetMap

Published on 2008-12-26 by Mark VandeWettering

I’m interested in mapping and in open source, so it’s interesting to see projects which combine both. Such is OpenStreetMap, a project which not only produces software to use maps, but also relies upon user data to create maps that can be used freely. I heard about this a while ago, but today it came to my attention again, and I must admit: the data looks pretty good! Check out this map of the bay area:

<td style="width: 256px; height: 256px;">
  <img decoding="async" src="http://tile.openstreetmap.org/10/164/394.png" />
</td>

<td style="width: 256px; height: 256px;">
  <img decoding="async" src="http://tile.openstreetmap.org/10/164/395.png" />
</td>

<td style="width: 256px; height: 256px;">
  <img decoding="async" src="http://tile.openstreetmap.org/10/164/396.png" />
</td>

Addendum: The map above just links to some tiles that are mantained on the OpenStreetMap website, and rendered by Mapnik, which is a toolkit for rendering maps. If you wanted to, you could render many different style maps using Mapnik: check out their documentation.

Addendum²: Tim O’Reilly wrote up some more about it.