I’m pleased to announce that the OpenStreetMap Americana project is moving to a new digital home at https://americanamap.org. This move is part of an ongoing effort to partner with OSM US and to take advantage of the support they can provide as a local chapter. The user experience will remain the same – OSM Americana is and will remain community maintained and led.
As part of this partnership, we will be transferring the source code repository to the OSM Americana github organization. I have always intended for this to be a community effort, and in transferring the repository away from my personal github space, I want to send a clear signal that this is a community project where members of the maintaner team have equal voice. In essense, our new URL schemes will reflect how the project actually runs.
If you are using any links that start with OpenStreetMap Americana, please update them! After we complete the repository transfer, they will stop working. Other github.com links will redirect to the new location.
I would also like to formally acknowledge and thank OSM US in sponsoring the tileserver that runs Americana, @quincylvania for his technical support as the OSM US staff liaison to the project, and for their making the tileserver scripts open source. Thanks to their sponsorship, we are now updating the planet tiles on a 3-4 hour loop. This project is just one of the many OSM US programs that support the US mapping community. I would encourage anyone active in OSM to join OSM US as a member to help support mapping initiatives like this one.
I know it’s not the overall aim of OSM Americana, though would it be technical feasible to use those vector-tiles as well for rendering QA “overlays” such as TigerMap (tiger:reviewed=no might not be part of the vector-tile, is it?) or roads without name, surface, maxspeed… highways crossing waterways without layer… stuff like this.
Just came to my mind, while reading that part of your news. Since the rendering happening on the client, it would be no additional effort on the server necessary and it would be awesome to have such QA-layers with frequent updates.
By the way, yes we know, we know, cool URIs don’t change. Let this be a cautionary tale to future open-source developers to get a separate GitHub organization and custom GitHub Pages domain set up early, before getting the word out.
Tracking down all the soon-to-be-broken URLs has certainly opened my eyes to how influential a simple map website can become in a short time. I didn’t anticipate OSM Americana becoming the reference OSM renderer for languages as diverse as Hawaiian, Pennsylvania German, Squamish, and Nynorsk, but I’m glad we can make a difference in this small way.
Indeed, OSM Americana is rendering vector tiles from a shared tile server that OSMUS recently took on. At this point, the schema is still more or less OpenMapTiles, but it might evolve in the future based on the needs of projects like OSM Americana that depend on it.
TIGERMap already uses vector data for its overlays. However, it uses range requests into a monolithic PMTiles archive rather than loading each individual tile as a separate file. This archive contains attributes that a more user-facing schema like OpenMapTiles would never include. That said, TIGERMap could conceivably swap out the osm-carto basemap for OSM Americana or some other stylesheet based on the OSMUS-hosted tileset.
I assume highway=* and surface=* and name* is part of that schema, so in theory on client-side the style-sheet could somehow be changed to display OSM Americana, but out of the same vector-tile render on top highway=residential and -name with a purple overlay and highway -surface with an orange overlay. Without causing any additional effort on the server.
However, I think the question you’re asking, is whether OSM tags are exposed in the vector tiles. The answer is no. The way it works is that OSM data is consumed and then converted into a simpler set of attributes for the tiles. In some cases the attributes will in fact match the underlying OSM tags, but in many cases, multiple tags will result in the same attributes. The tiles are intended to minimize the amount of data sent to the client.
It would be: class=minor surface=paved
in the transportation layer. Multiple categories of “minor” road are grouped together with common attributes because it’s expected that a map would render them identically.
This is all described in the OpenMapTiles documentation, which I’d encourage reading.
One limitation of vector tiles is they really need to be reasonably customized to their use. Making vector tiles “generic” or “multipurpose” makes them too big, and it’s not really what we’re trying to accomplish here.
Heads up: if all goes according to plan, we’ll be moving the repository sometime tomorrow (August 4). At that point, any outdated links to the old GitHub Pages site will stop redirecting to americanamap.org and will become 404 errors. Please update your bookmarks to point to americanamap.org.
We’ve reached out to anyone maintaining an active fork of OSM Americana to make sure they’ve updated references to the old site, but just in case we missed you, here are the changes you’ll want to merge or cherry-pick:
Of course, if you’re able to point these references to a domain specific to your fork, that would be even better.
On the off chance that anyone has been linking to the “raw” copy of a file in the repository on raw.githubusercontent.com, as opposed to the normal syntax-colored view on github.com, that link may need to be updated too.
We apologize for the inconvenience and hope this will be the last such move for a long time.
We recently installed a redirect from the old GitHub Pages site to the new americanamap.org domain. This redirect breaks any GitHub link that points to the old ZeLonewolf/openstreetmap-americana repository, including links to source code, issues, pull requests, or images attached to comments.[1] Unfortunately, there’s nothing we can do to fix this breakage, so please update any remaining bookmarks to point to the osm-americana/openstreetmap-americana repository instead.
