A relation can represent a complex shape with holes or with multiple regions. Lastly, relations are collections of ways. For example, the way pictured in the third image above belongs to data group "place," and its subgroup, "island." In other words, this particular way belongs to the "island" layer under the "place" group. They are tagged with keys that define the data group they belong to. Ways consist of a collection of nodes identified by their unique identifier. A way can be rendered as an enclosed shape or as an open-ended line. Of course, there is additional metadata, but we can safely discard it. The most basic data element, a node simply has a unique identifier, latitude, and longitude associated with it. The beginning of your file should look nearly-identical to the first picture of this step - some basic metadata and geographic boundaries will be listed.Īs you scroll the file, you will notice three data elements used throughout: You will first notice this is an XML file, which is great! XML is easy enough to parse. If you're determined to use a large region, consider writing a script to throw away superfluous data you're not planning to draw.īegin by opening your downloaded OSM file into your favorite text editing software. Note #2: If your downloaded OSM file is larger than 30MB, the Python program I wrote will noticeably slow. If this happens to you, click the "Overpass API" button to download your larger file. Note #1: If your selected region contains too much data, you will get an error that you've selected too many nodes. Once satisfied, click the "Export" button to download your OSM data file. Shape and place this box over the region of interest. Select the "Manually select a different area" link, which will bring up a box on your screen. Now, zoom in to view the region with which you're interested in collecting map data. As such, visiting the OSM webpage is where the map stylizing journey begins.Īfter arriving at the OSM website, click on the "Export" tab to show the map export tools. OSM explicitly permits open-ended usage of their data in the name of Open Source software. OSM is a collaborative project involving people all across the globe contributing data. In fact, they explicitly disallow web-scraping from Google Maps.įortunately, my despair was short-lived upon my discovery of OpenStreetMap (OSM). After significant research, I discovered that Google really doesn't want people playing with their data, in a creative sense or otherwise. When I first began this project, the most glaring question was, "where can I get map data." Naturally, as you'd expect, I immediately thought of Google Maps. I hope to share what I've learned with the community. My motivation in writing this instructable is due to the fact that I found very minimal information on how to create your own stylized maps from scratch. After a day of prototyping with some basic scripting, I was able to generate extremely promising results - so promising that I knew I needed to formalize my scripts such that others could easily make creations of their own. This idea has been rattling around in my mind for the past year, and I finally took the time I needed to bring it to fruition. Quite frankly, I started this project because I thought it would be fun to do. What is my motivation behind this project? I'm very excited to see what the community creates! The following video highlights how I personally generate stylized maps, but keep reading for the intimate details. I will first describe the process through which you can write software to stylize maps, followed by an example of the Python software I wrote to perform this task. A stylized map is a map where the user can specify which data layers are visualized, as well as define the style with which each layer is visualized. In this instructable, I will describe a process by which you can generate your own custom-made stylized maps.
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