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Frequently asked questions
We designed the style to cater primarily to a North American audience, hence the name, to demonstrate the North American cartographic tradition within the OpenStreetMap ecosystem. Hopefully the design choices we’ve made resonate with people who have grown up with maps by North American publishers.
Nonetheless, we are part of the global OpenStreetMap project; the map proudly includes OSM’s data worldwide. We make a good-faith effort to serve users from around the world in every language, but sometimes we have to make tradeoffs and compromises in order to adhere to the intended design direction. For example, our treatment of highways and railroad tracks is probably much less familiar to people who grew up looking at continental European maps.
We recognize that there are many cartographic traditions around the world, each of them deserving of a high-quality, OSM-based map style. If you want to take this project in a different direction, we’ve made it easy for you to fork this repository and deploy a map as good as this one within minutes. We hope this map is just the beginning of many diverse projects!
OpenStreetMap Americana is currently available as a Web application, which you can run in any modern mobile browser. However, we don’t currently support other environments, such as native map libraries, applications that have their own map formats, or GPS devices. We would like to make the map more portable in the future.
This project is just about the rendered map. For the full package, including satellite imagery, search, and directions, check out other OpenStreetMap-based sites like Ben Maps.
OpenStreetMap Americana renders map tiles that conform to the OpenMapTiles schema. The map tiles are generally based on OpenStreetMap, which is available under the Open Database License.
When OSM lacks the name of a feature in a given language, the tiles fall back to a label in the corresponding item on Wikidata, a public-domain companion to Wikipedia. This fallback is available for places, points of interest, airports, roads, bodies of water, parks, and mountain peaks.
At low zoom levels, coastlines and boundaries come from the public-domain Natural Earth project.
Americana uses vector tiles generated by PlaneTiler. There are a few known issues with this implementation currently:
- Road names seem not to always be available in all the expected languages (#618)
There isn’t a one-to-one correspondence between what you see on the map and the underlying OpenStreetMap tags. This project depends on the OpenMapTiles schema, which postprocesses OSM data into a more consistent dataset. That said, OpenStreetMap Americana’s taginfo project lists the most interesting tags that the style uses indirectly, including all the network tags that result in route shields.
OpenStreetMap Americana tries to label places in your browser’s preferred language. To change this preference, consult your browser’s documentation: Chrome, Firefox, Safari for macOS, Safari for iOS. You can also override this preference by adding &language= to the URL, followed by a comma-separated list of IETF language tags. For example, here’s a map labeled in Portuguese, falling back to Spanish. If we don’t have the name of a place in any of your preferred languages, the style shows the name in the local language as a last resort.