Community features

Chris Beddow explores the history of OpenStreetMap and how it needs to evolve to survive alongside modern techniques like mass-produced data from satellite and street view imagery. Can OSM continue to grow, or will it always be limited by its need for human interaction

Ordnance Survey have put together a series of tutorials on how to visualise historic call-outs from the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI). Other tutorials in the series cover how to produce similar maps using QGIS and Tableau. Tutorial – visualising data in Kepler with the

I only stumbled across Harold Fisk’s Mississippi River meander maps in the past few years, oblivious to both their age and their sheer scale. This short article by Jason Kottke is a nice love-letter to his maps — I particularly like how he describes

StoryMaps are all the rage at the moment, and this one on mapping Mount Everest by Alex Tait — geographer at the National Geographic Society — is no exception. It’s a fascinating insight into an expedition to perform photogrammetry of the entire Khumbu glacier. Inspiring!

SharedStreets have created an open standard for curb restriction data (eg. parking restrictions) and have been working on integrating this standard into OpenStreetMap. The idea is that governments can release curb-restriction data and it can be directly integrated into tools and maps using this

Mapbox collect over 300 million miles of anonymised location data every day to produce speed estimations for routing. This article by Saba El-Hilo goes into detail about how they use Apache Spark to calculate 30 billion of those speed estimations each week. Calculating 30

This fantastic article by Datawrapper covers the various things to consider when using choropleth maps. It’s a useful reference for understanding when to use a choropleth and how to make them communicate things better. What to consider when creating choropleth mapsSimple do’s