MapOSMatic, free city maps for everyone !

Résumé

Launched in september 2009, MapOSMatic is a web service that allows anyone to create maps for any city of the world, using OpenStreetMap data. From the beginning, MapOSMatic is able to render poster maps, where the map is rendered on a single, large, page of paper, with an overlayed grid. The map is associated to a street and public buildings index that allows to easily find street on the maps.

In spring 2012, the MapOSMatic service was improved and now also allows to generate booklets, where the map and street index are split on several pages, which eases the printing process on standard paper formats such as A4. Since this time, it is also possible to choose between different stylesheets, for different map rendering styles.

The generated maps can for example be used for information panels on cities, or as folded maps or atlas booklets. The city of Orange, in France, is now using MapOSMatic to generate the printed maps it offers to tourists.

The complete code of MapOSMatic is free software, available under the AGPL license.

As of april 2012, MapOSMatic has generated more than 40.000 maps, and has been adapted for many languages : french, english, german, italian, catalan, russian, arabic, portuguese, dutch, croatian, polish and spanish.

Through this conference, we will introduce the history of the MapOSMatic project and its features, give details on its technical implementation and describe the future directions.

Biographie

Thomas Petazzoni has been since the beginning of the project, an active member of the development team of MapOSMatic. During day time, he works for Free Electrons, an embedded Linux services and training company, and during night time, he works on Buildroot (an embedded Linux build system) and participates to Toulibre (the Toulouse free software local organization).