Project Roadmap

This page documents the strategy and plans for the project.

Versioning

The project will follow a semantic versioning scheme, to the extent that this makes sense on a digital cartography project. In general, major version changes imply changes in compatibility with backing data sources; minor versions reflect changes in our application of data attributes to the rendered map; and micro versions represent bug fixes. The first two major version definitions are as follows:

• v1.x.x: A map with a reasonably-complete set of features for a general-purpose map, as described below. This version is based entirely on the most recently-published version of the OpenMapTiles schema.
• v2.x.x: A map which extends the features from v1.x.x, and incorporates additional custom vector layers beyond those used by OpenMapTiles.

Version 1.0 Minimum Viable Product

Version 1.0 of Americana is intended to be a reasonably-complete map that covers all of the must-have features for a usable, minimally-acceptable American-style general purpose map. This minimum feature set includes:

• Airports & runways
• Area features
  • Educational
  • Marinas
  • Military bases
  • Parks
  • Tourism sites e.g. zoos, amusement parks
• Boundaries
• Buildings
• Paths
• Places (comprehensive)
• Points of Interest
• Protected areas
• Rail
  • Class styling
  • Service track differentiation
  • Station icons and labels
• Roads
  • Class styling
  • Expressway differentiation
  • Highway shields
    • Canada national & provincial highways
    • US Interstate, US Highway, & state-level routes
  • Paved/unpaved styling
  • Toll road differentiation
• Water

Version 2.0 High-level Features

Version 2 will identify features that we want to render in an American-style map which are not currently present in OpenMapTiles. Thus the style will rely both on OpenMapTiles as well as additional vector layers outside of OpenMapTiles. One layer already identified is a "trails" layer, which supports the goals of the OpenStreetMap US trails working group to establish a reference implementation of access-aware trail rendering. Custom layers should be hosted and available for general use so that users of the style can access them online.

Work needed to complete this includes:

• Modify planetiler so that it has the ability to configure arbitrary outputs.
• Develop schema configurations for the custom layers and establish source code control, likely in a sub-folder of this repo
• Establish a hosting, management, and governance strategy for the custom layers, likely in partnership with OpenStreetMap US
• Configure continuous integration / continuous deployment of custom layers into cloud hosting
• Identify the set of custom layers that will comprise v2.0.0 and develop front-end styles

Governance

It is desirable that the project transition from the founder's personal github account to an appropriate organizational account. This would signal to contributors that the project is community-owned and broadly reflects a North American cultural understanding. To that end, the project will seek to transition to an appropriate organizational owner such as OSM US.

Additionally, we hope that OpenStreetMap Americana will become a promoted regional map style accessible from the OpenStreetMap US website.