This year, I was invited to visit the State of the Map conference in Heidelberg as a scholar. Obviously, I would like to thank the OSM Foundation for sponsoring me. In addition to being a frequent mapper, I am also a maintainer of openstreetmap-carto (the default stylesheet on openstreetmap.org), and this role was the main reason I was visiting the conference. At the conference, I met with Paul, Christoph (who I had never met before in real life) and Andy. We had some discussions on the future of the stylesheet, including a public ‘bird of a feather session’, in which we met with other community members.

One of the things that has been on the horizon for quite a while is vector tile rendering. During the conference, we drafted an action plan for getting a vector rendering ready. Some choices need to be made: do we start from scratch, or do we continue with the current map design? Do we render the vector tiles on the client side, or do we translate vector tiles to raster tiles on the server? Which software will we use to generate the vector tiles? On the stylesheet side, some technical changes need to be made, fortunately most of which are relatively simple. Unfortunately, even with these changes made it seems that performance remains a significant limitation. By now, the first steps on the action plan already have been completed. There is still a lot of work to do (including technical challenges to solve), but we have been making progress in this area for sure.