Frequently Asked Questions

The license of the generated map is the same as OSM data, currently Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license.

Informally, this means that the map is free for any use, including commercial one, as long as credits are given and derived work is distributed with the same conditions. For any further question, ask mailto:contact@maposmatic.org.

After I typed the name of a city, I see a few suggestions, but the one I am interested in is not selectable and a messages suggests me to “contribute”. What should I do to “contribute” ?

MapOSMatic uses the OpenStreetMap (OSM) database and will accept to render cities based on their name only if a few criteria are met. First, the name requested has to be close to that of a way known to the OSM database: we use the Nominatim service for that. Moreover, the OSM entry associated with that way has to be tagged with admin_level=8 and boundary=administrative. So, if you see a result that corresponds to what you're looking for but you are not allowed to select it, then it most probably means that it does not meet the previous criteria in the OSM database. To be able to select these results, you or an OSM contributor will have to update the OSM database.

You can find more information about these tags on http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:admin_level.

I submitted a new rendering job. The job has been started OK but, after I waited and waited and waited, all I get is “Rendering failed, please contact [email protected]”. What's wrong ?

The most frequent cause for this “rendering failure” is that we don't allow renderings to last more than 20 minutes. So, after your rendering failed, if you see that it ran 20 minutes before failing (this is detailed in your job's status), then it most probably means it has been aborted because it was taking too long. This is probably due to the fact that the area you are trying to render is rather large, or it contains many details. Either try to re-submit it later when the server is less loaded. Or contribute to MapOSMatic/osm2pgsql/mapnik to optimize the database queries we are performing.

1. When you request a city which has been requested in the previous 24 hours, you are automatically redirected to it;
2. We know that we need to improve the map search features and we are working on it: https://savannah.nongnu.org/task/?9689

See the page on how to translate MapOSMatic.

By design, we are one day behind the latest OSM data (except if something goes wrong ). When OSM releases the map for day D, at most 1 hour later we start to update our server with the map for day D-1. This update process currently takes about 16 hours on our server. We're working on reducing this delay, but there's only much we can do.

The About page gives some technical information.

We are currently using a dual core E2180 @ 2GHz Intel machine with 2 GB RAM + 3.5 GB swap and a single 250 GB SATA-II hard drive (7200 RPM, 8 MB cache). The OS is Ubuntu 9.04 x86_64. The CPU load on this machine is visible at http://stats.maposmatic.org/status/load-day.png.