We have just sent the following announcement to OpenStreetMap lists, officially announcing the improvements made to MapOSMatic during the latest hackfest.
As a new year’s present, the MapOSMatic team is proud to announce that a new version of the maposmatic.org website has been put online, with major improvements over the initial version announced in September 2009.
For the record, MapOSMatic is a website that allows to generate city maps from OpenStreetMap data. Each map is divided into squares to easily find streets and is delivered with the corresponding street index.
The new MapOSMatic provides the following improvements :
- Support for the whole world. Any location in the world can now be rendered on maposmatic.org.
- OpenStreetMap database updated daily. Until now, the database had never been updated since the service was started in September 2009. Now, the geographic database used to render the maps is updated daily, providing maps with the latest contributions to OpenStreetMap. Each map contains the date at which it was generated.
- Better city search engine. Thanks to Nominatim, we now provide a search engine that allows to find cities in a much more usable way: cities with the same name can be distinguished and the search works even when the city name is not completely correct.
- Support for other languages. A few parts of the map rendering process is language-dependent and we now have the infrastructure to use language-dependent code. For the moment, we support English, French and Italian, but we are waiting for your contributions to support other languages. The website has also been translated to German and Italian.
- Amenities in the index. In addition to the streets, we have added important amenities to the index: schools, town hall, post offices, places of worship, etc.
All these improvements are available now on http://www.maposmatic.org
You can follow the progress and improvements of MapOSMatic on our blog at http://news.maposmatic.org. MapOSMatic is of course free software, you can fetch its source code and contribute to the project, see http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/maposmatic/.
Do not hesitate to send us your feedback, comments, suggestions and contributions to [email protected]
Cheers,
The MapOSMatic team.