OpenStreetMap Carto

These are the CartoCSS map stylesheets for the Standard map layer on OpenStreetMap.org.

The general purpose, the cartographic design goals and guidelines for this style are outlined in CARTOGRAPHY.md.

These stylesheets can be used in your own cartography projects, and are designed to be easily customised. They work with Kosmtik and also with the command-line CartoCSS processor.

Since August 2013 these stylesheets have been used on the OSMF tileservers (tile.openstreetmap.org), and are updated from each point release. They supersede the previous XML-based stylesheets.

Installation

You need a PostGIS database populated with OpenStreetMap data along with auxillary shapefiles. See INSTALL.md.

Contributing

Contributions to this project are welcome, see CONTRIBUTING.md for full details.

Versioning

This project follows a MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH versioning system. In the context of a cartographic project you can expect the following:

• PATCH: When a patch version is released, there would be no reason not to upgrade. PATCH versions contain only bugfixes e.g. stylesheets won't compile, features are missing by mistake, etc.
• MINOR: These are routine releases and happen every 2-5 weeks. They will contain changes to what's shown on the map, how they appear, new features added and old features removed. They may rarely contain changes to assets i.e. shapefiles and fonts but will not contain changes that require software or database upgrades.
• MAJOR: Any change the requires reloading a database, or upgrading software dependencies will trigger a major version change.

Roadmap

Initial Release (v1.0.0, December 2012)

This was a full re-implementation of the original OSM style, with only a few bugs discovered later. There's been no interest in creating further point releases in the v1.x series.

Mapnik 2 work (v2.x)

The v2.x series initially focused on refactoring the style, both to to fix glitches and to leverage new features in CartoCSS / Mapnik to simplify the stylesheets with only small changes to the output, as well as removing 'old-skool' tagging methods that are now rarely used. It then started adding new features.

Mapnik and CartoCSS update (v3.x)

The v3.x series was triggered by an update to the required Mapnik and CartoCSS versions.

Care has been taken to not get too clever with variables and expressions. While these often make it easier to customise, experience has shown that over-cleverness (e.g. interpolated entities) can discourage contributions.

Database schema change (v4.x)

The v4.x series includes osm2pgsql lua transforms and a hstore column with all other tags, allowing use of more OpenStreetMap data. Users need to reload their databases, v3.x compatibility is not maintained.

Database schema change (v5.x)

The v5.x series updates Lua tag transforms, linestring and polygon decisions have changed.

There are over 500 open requests, some that have been open for years. These need reviewing and dividing into obvious fixes, or additional new features that need some cartographic judgement.

Alternatives

There are many open-source stylesheets written for creating OpenStreetMap-based maps using Mapnik, many based on this project. Some alternatives are:

• OSM Bright
• XML-based stylesheets
• OpenStreetMap "FR" Carto
• OpenStreetMap Carto German

Maintainers

• Andy Allan @gravitystorm
• Daniel Koć @kocio-pl
• Christoph Hormann @imagico
• Lukas Sommer @sommerluk
• Joseph Eisenberg @jeisenbe

Previous maintainers

• Paul Norman @pnorman
• Michael Glanznig @nebulon42
• Matthijs Melissen @matthijsmelissen
• Mateusz Konieczny @matkoniecz