OpenOrienteeringMap now Worldwide

I’ve released a new version (v2.1) of OpenOrienteeringMap today, and there are now three editions – UK (as before), Ireland and Global. An earlier global version existed from 2010 to 2012, and has been able to be re-implemented thanks to a server upgrade at work. I hope to have it running for as long as possible.

OpenOrienteeringMap allows you to easily create high quality vector PDF maps, of OpenStreetMap data styled to look like simple orienteering maps, optionally with “score” control points included. It was originally released in 2009, with a major update in 2012 commissioned by British Orienteering. OpenOrienteeringMap is intended for use for urban training exercises and simple street events. As OpenStreetMap (the wiki world map) is updated, both by orienteers and by the general public, so OpenOrienteeringMap also improves. More info about the service.

Here are the different versions:

You can access them at these links:

• UK edition
• Ireland edition
• Global edition

The Ireland (IOA) version uses the same database as the UK version, it is just a cosmetic rebranding (& without the postcode search or the contour generation). The global version uses a much larger database which takes three days to create even on the new, fast server, and uses up a lot of disk space. Hence, it will only be updated every few months, unless work dictates. Note also the global version is slower to access and use, because of the extra time taken to live-render the images, from a much larger (100GB+) database than the UK/Ireland versions (<1GB!). It will be even slower if multiple people are visiting the site at the same time, so if the images are very slow to load, wait a few minutes before trying again. In addition to this release, I have open-sourced the Mapnik stylesheets and symbols used to create the maps, on GitHub. I encourage interested people who which to see feature additions, changes or reorderings to submit pull requests. Note that I am using the pre-release version of Mapnik 2.3.0 and the rendering is done via python bindings.

See the stylesheets on GitHub here. If you just want to see the map, here’s a link straight to the global version.