On Friday, April 29th we’re opening the Garage doors to welcome friends, family, and participants of this year’s Women Who Code DC Hackathon! The Hackathon marks the two year anniversary of Women Who Code DC, so let’s party!
We’re kicking things off at 6:30PM, and can’t wait to celebrate with these awesome women as they prepare for a weekend of learning, coding and networking.
Our data team is constantly exploring ways to improve the quality and coverage of OpenStreetMap to create the most detailed map of the world. To do this, we use feedback from our users,probe data from partners, inspect directions routing failures, support HOT activations, clean up inconsistent metadata and regular mappingsprints.
To visualize our global contribution over the years, we used OSMlint, OSM-QA-tiles, andTippecanoe. Are you global mapper? Try these tools to showcase your map edits! If you are new to OpenStreetMap, check out our mapping blog series. Hit me on Twitter for questions.
Our edits over North America. These includes large scale TIGER import re-alignment along with daily improvement based on user feedback.
Welcome Nat Slaughter, the latest addition to the Mapbox design team! Nat has a history of working on unique and complex data visualization projects, like these Inman Park Squirrel Census posters.
Nat will help improve the visual systems behind Mapbox’s point of interest and highway shield icons and also work on key map design projects. His first effort is the relaunch of our Maki icon set with a new, detailed styleguide and completely redrawn icons. Expect to hear more about Maki 2.0 soon!
We’re always working on making our APIs easier to use. Last month, we launched new API documentation. And now, we’re launching an API Playground to make it easy for hands-on exploration of our API!
The API Playground is a new place to learn about Mapbox’s APIs interactively - by trying out different inputs and exploring different endpoints. For now, we’re starting off with the Geocoding API endpoints. Next up is a playground for the Directions API endpoints.
Here is a walk-through of using the playground:
Playing with the new Mapbox API Playground
So have fun exploring the forward geocoding and reverse geocoding playgrounds!
You can now use map styles designed with Mapbox Studio in spatial analysis tools including Tableau, ArcGIS Online, and the CartoDB Editor.
Click on the “Share & use” button of a style, follow the instructions on the share page to paste the URL into your application, and you are all set! From this page, you can also share your design with coworkers or integrate the style into web or mobile applications.
The Mapbox data team is always exploring ways to improve our workflow for resolving OpenStreetMap issues with the Java OpenStreetMap Editor (JOSM). Over time, we have found techniques that increase our productivity. We work on multiple windows while we download or upload data, and we use a gaming mouse that’s configured to JOSM shortcuts to speed up repetitive actions. We can download data or draw buildings with just a few clicks.
The techniques described above, in addition to our mapping guides, allow our data team to resolve thousands of OpenStreetMap issues every day with high quality and productivity.
Apps for outdoor activities should have maps designed for outdoor activities. Our completely redesigned Mapbox Outdoors style combines a detailed road network with useful outdoor features: high-contrast contour lines and hillshading, labels for mountain peaks and outdoor amenities, detailed path styling, and more. This style is part of an upcoming update to our core map styles – watch out for it soon in Mapbox Studio and on all our platforms!
The World Bank’s Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR) has been using OpenStreetMap, UAVs, and satellite imagery to assess flood risk in the Mundeni Aru and Attanagalu Oya River Basins. In partnership with the Sri Lankan Government Disaster Management Center, as well as the Survey Department of Sri Lanka, the World Bank is working to improve OpenStreetMap data in order to better assess financial and humanitarian risk from recurring floods.
Ground Control Point for UAVs
Updates to Mapbox Satellite imagery in the areas surrounding the UAV surveys helped to broadly improve road and housing data tracing work, while the UAV imagery composited on top provides extremely detailed imagery and terrain models for vulnerable areas.
The portability of UAVs, matched with the high spatial resolution of imagery they provide (often submeter) make them an excellent tool to aid in mapping where aerial or walking surveys are out of date, nonexistent, cost prohibitive or otherwise hard to obtain.
UAV imagery acquired by the Survey Department of Sri Lanka captured extreme detail for tracing homes, roads, and even power lines.
Our image processing pipeline handles these extremely high resolution pixels with the same efficiency as the satellite data we work with. To talk about processing UAV imagery for humanitarian mapping, ping me (@mikel) or my colleague @dnomadb on Twitter.
Last December through March, Mapbox sponsored an intern through the Outreachy program to work with the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) on redesigning their website. Outreachy organizes internships specifically for underrepresented groups within the free and open source software (FOSS) community, bringing together enthusiastic newcomers and experienced FOSS contributors, like HOT.
Mapbox already has a long history of commitment to HOT's mission: we participate in crisis mapping, provide imagery, and contribute funding. Our choice to sponsor their website redesign project reflects our enthusiasm for supporting all aspects of their operations, as well as their diversity efforts.
I've been a fly on the wall these last few months, observing graphic design intern Moriah Ellig, web development lead Felix Delattre and the rest of their team work collaborate on this project. We've invited Moriah to share some thoughts on her internship:
Before becoming an Outreachy intern, I had only been a passive participant in FOSS communities – using tools and software, reading forums, and quietly learning how to be a web designer. I was immediately welcomed by the HOT community, and that inclusion and support has been so important to me as I venture outside of my comfort zone. FOSS is built around sharing, and being open about my challenges throughout the internship allowed the community and my mentors to encourage and assist me instead of floundering on my own.
One of the more challenging aspects of the redesign was understanding the various goals and groups that comprise the HOT community. I learned how important it is to ask questions about the purpose of the content, because any confusion or lack of clarity will show up as messiness in the design.
The website is HOT’s public face as well as the common gathering place for HOT information, so it needs to be both engaging and accurately represent the variety of HOT’s activities. The new site showcases the breadth of work that HOT volunteers are doing, and emphasizes the variety of ways new volunteers can get involved. Mobile devices were taken into consideration resulting in a responsive design that will make HOT’s site easier to use on smaller screens, an increasingly significant visitor demographic. The redesign meets the initial goals we set for the project, so I’m very excited to see it in action.
HOT's homepage, before and after.
I have had great help from my mentor, Felix Delattre, as well as graphic design guru Katja Ulbert. They have generously shared their time and expertise with me throughout the project, and enthusiastically supported my first contribution to the FOSS world.
Working with HOT gave me insights into some of the ways in which technology can be leveraged to improve lives. My Outreachy internship with HOT significantly increased my confidence in my ability to contribute to FOSS projects, and I want to keep up the momentum. I recently participated in my first hackathon, a local “civic” hackathon, and you will find me exploring other ways FOSS can be used to assist with people-oriented problems!
Read more about HOT's website redesign process, and check out the newly-launched hotosm.org!
Versión en español abajo.
Today CubaConf opens the first ever international free software conference in Cuba.
We’re proud to sponsor CubaConf and bring Wille Marcel to talk OpenStreetMap and open mapping. Willie will also work to improve the incredible map of Havana by adding local knowledge through Field Papers and mobile OpenStreetMap editing apps.
Have a great time celebrating this unique moment in Cuba. Find Wille and long-time Cuban mapper PB to learn more!
Palacio del Segundo Cabo: CubaConf venue / sede de CubaConf. Image: Mmoyaq
Hoy comienza CubaConf, la primera conferencia internacional de software libre en Cuba.
Nos enorgullece patrocinar CubaConf y llevar a Wille Marcel para hablar sobre OpenStreetMap y mapeo abierto. Willie también trabajará en mejorar el increíble mapa de la Habana agregando conocimiento local con Field Papers y apps móviles para editar OpenStreetMap.
Disfruten la celebración de este momento único en Cuba. Para conocer más, ¡Contacta a Wille y a PB quien tiene gran experiencia mapeando en Cuba!
This Wednesday we will be presenting at the North Bay GIS Developer Meeting in Petaluma, CA.
Tyler will speak on The Autonomous Map: machine inputs, telemetry, and ‘self-healing’ data, reviewing some of the exciting work we have done to enrich OpenStreetMap with mobile sensors.
You can now imitate in-car navigation experiences with our guidance simulator, a tool built on Mapbox GL JS and our Directions API.
With the guidance simulator, you can preview routes at high-speed, adjust the camera position in response to driving maneuvers, and seek to different timestamps along your route. You can even add guidance-specific labeling and styling using Studio and our guidance styling tool.
Check out the source code and contribute on GitHub.
Congratulations to Kushan Joshi on acceptance to Google Summer of Code, a program which pairs talented students with mentors to work on open source software. This summer, Kushan and I will be working together to add visual lane tagging capability to OpenStreetMap’s iD editor.
Knowing the number and type of travel and turning lanes on each highway segment is essential for providing accurate directions and travel time estimates over the OpenStreetMap highway network. The lane tagging tool will make it easy for the thousands of volunteer mappers to contribute detailed lane information using iD every day!
Watch the iD editor project on GitHub for updates!
Over 20 million miles of road data have been added to OpenStreetMap by volunteers.
We just pushed three million square kilometers of new imagery into Mapbox Satellite. Last year, we talked about our purchase of this high-res data from DigitalGlobe. A few weeks ago, I posted about one of the ways we choose where to improve Mapbox Satellite. Today, all Mapbox users can take advantage of a massive refresh that updates high-priority urban areas worldwide and improves coverage in hundreds of other spots.
The maps below show a few examples of this fresh 30 cm imagery – the highest resolution satellite imagery available in the market. Check out our Instagram feed and come back to the blog in the next few weeks as we show you some of our favorite updates. You’ll be seeing high-res data captured within the last few months by DigitalGlobe’s WorldView-3 satellite. We’ll also be sharing engineering details on how we’ve optimized our imagery processing pipelines to support large scale updates.
Vector tiles are how we store geographic data for rendering on the web or mobile devices. Every time you upload your data to Mapbox it is converted into a tileset; a collection of vector tiles.
For us to confidently render your geographic data with tools such as Mapbox GL JS, vector tiles must encode geographic information consistently. We created the Mapbox Vector Tile Specification specifically for this. The specification recently graduated to version 2, and we have been incorporating these changes into our tools.
To bring clarity to the specification, we put together a highly visual, interactive page that dives into versions, how geometry and attributes are encoded, and what the specification doesn’t cover.
Head over to the new Vector Tile Specification guide to take a look!
Questions about the specification? Ideas on how to improve the guide? Reach out on GitHub or Twitter.
The Mapbox Vector Tile Specification recently graduated to version 2.0 and along with it a number of our tools and products, including some new documentation. The specification is an important way for us to encode and decode geometry within our tools to render your data as fast as possible.
1.0 and 2.0?The specification is much more explicit in all aspects. The number of organizations that are using and creating vector tiles continues to grow, and a more explicit standard will help to guarantee the interoperability of Mapbox Vector Tiles. If vector tiles can be more specific about the data they contain, we can speed up our tools and your maps. We can even improve the efficiency of our triangulation libraries, such as Earcut.
Previous versions of vector tiles didn’t require valid geometries (according to OGC validation), which led to rendering bugs with GL technologies, related to the triangulation libraries. Valid geometries provide better results from the use of analysis tools on the data the vector tiles contain.
Some key changes in the specification include:
version field in all layers..mvt from .vector.pbf for clarity.If you are uploading custom data through Mapbox Studio or generating tilesets with Mapbox Studio Classic, your tilesets will be version 2.0 compliant. Version 2.0 vector tiles are backward-compatible. Anywhere a version 1.0 tile can be used, a version 2.0 tile can be substituted. Existing versions of libraries such as Mapbox GL JS and Mapbox.js work great with new vector tiles.
If you work with tools that we actively develop, such as Mapnik Vector Tile or Node Mapnik, they are now generating version 2.0 tiles. Over the next few months, we are going to explore incorporating the new specification into other, non-Mapnik tools such as GeoJSON VT and Tippecanoe.
Check out the new Vector Tiles Specification guide to learn more about vector tiles through interactive examples. And if you’re attending FOSS4GNA next month in Raleigh, hear me talk more on Mapbox Vector Tile Specification 2.0 at my session.
We just released a new version of Maki, our open source map icon set. Maki 3 includes 114 icons, plus style guidelines to help the icon set grow to meet user’s needs, and an iconset editor for quickly customizing map icon sets.
We redrew every icon from the ground up to make them more legible than ever. The new icons were systematically designed to have clear silhouettes and better pixel alignment, ensuring visual clarity for a variety of monitor types and devices.
Maki now has style guidelines, which we used to unify the icon set.
We designed the latest version of Maki to be easy to customize. Use the iconset editor to style Maki to fit your next map style:
In order to ensure all the icons in the set conform to the design principles, the Maki project includes tests to check for invalid SVG elements, properties, file sizes, and file names.
Maki is in a great position to keep growing. It’s open source and CC0 licensed. With the help of the design guidelines, both new contributors and old alike will be able to work more efficiently than ever through the public icon request backlog.
If you’re working on a project that demands an extensive icon library, or even if you just need one or two icons that aren’t yet in Maki, consider reading the guidelines and contributing to the project yourself.
The latest version of the Maki comes with an icon set editor for customizing and organizing large icon sets.
To make it easier and faster to create icon sets, all styling in the Maki icon editor is group-based. The interface lets you organize icons into groups that correspond to categories in your data, and then apply styles to every icon in the group.
Moving an icon from one group to another automatically changes icon styling:
Add background emblems to icons, change fill color, and add strokes:
The editor includes the Maki icon set and lets you import your own SVG icons:
When you export your icon set from the editor, you’ll get a folder full of ready to use SVGs, plus a special file called iconset.js. Use the iconset.js file to import your icon set back into the editor with all its groups and styles intact:
Start a new icon set with the same icons and groups used by the Mapbox default styles if you want, so you don’t need to understand Mapbox data or POI classifications in order to create icon sets:
When adding icons to a Mapbox Studio style, all the icons in your template style will automatically be replaced by the new icons:
Every icon in the Maki set gets added as a default icon in the Maki editor. Maki is open source, CC0 licensed, and has detailed design guidelines. If you’re working on a project that demands a more extensive icon library than Maki provides, or even if you need one or two icons that aren’t yet in Maki, consider contributing to the project.
Justin Van Etten is joining Mapbox! As Mapbox’s first commercial counsel, Justin is jumping in with our business team to close sales and wrangle data licenses. Justin will be building the legal systems and processes that keep us running smoothly as our deal pipeline continues to grow.
Justin joins us from Ropes & Gray, where he covered everything from SaaS licenses to IPOs and data deals to privacy policies. Welcome!
We’ve launched the Analytics API, an API that Premium and Enterprise customers can use to programmatically check Mapbox usage. You can request usage by account as a whole or, if you’re using multiple API access tokens, by individual token.
Fetching my usage data and quickly plotting my map views for the last 4 months
You’ll always be able to access your usage details within your Mapbox account, but this new API allows you to bring your usage data into other applications. Build custom reports, send usage data to your customers in invoices, or build alerts based on your own internal targets.
We’d love to hear from you on what you’d like to see in the API, from additional details on map usage to mobile SDK usage and analytics. Have something you want to see added to the Analytics API? Hit me up on Twitter!
Sign up for a Premium account to start using the Analytics API today or email our sales team to learn about Enterprise.