Tracestrack Tile service

Information

Tracestrack is a sole proprietorship (eenmanszaak) registered in the Netherlands. Its focus is openstreetmap based raster tile hosting. Currently we support three categories of map layers:

  • Base map: carto and topo
  • Language overlays: including Arabic, English, Dutch, German, Spanish, Korean, Japanese, Simplified and Traditional Chinese etc.
  • Route overlays: bus, bicycle, subway and train routes
    • Several filters can be applied on these layers, creating several style flavors.

    1. Map Style

    Tracestrack Carto style is forked from openstreetmap-carto on Jan 12, 2021. Following is a main list of changes:

    Removed rendering

    • Power lines
    • Underground subways

    Updated rendering

    • Buildings from Z17
    • Simple 3D buildings
    • Pedestrian areas and ways
    • Simplified footway/cycleway/path
    • Man-made bridges
    • Improved high density highway rendering (e.g. Cairo: See in TracesMap.com)
    • Trees and tree rows

    Added rendering for

    • City districts: place=borough
    • Aquaculture areas: landuse=aquaculture
    • Tourism attractions: tourism=attraction
    • Busways: highway=busway
    • Solar farms and wind farms: power=plantplant:source=solarplant:source=wind
    • Highway/railway embankment: embankment=yes
    • Government landuse: landuse=governmental landuse=civic_admin landuse=institutional

    Misc

    • Use place:CN for Chinese place names
    • Use correct CJK fonts in Japan and Taiwan
    • Better line breaking for longer CJK place names

    Tracestrack Topo style is a hybrid of Carto and OpenTopoMap. It uses the same SRTM data to generate hillshades and countours, which lie on top of the Carto style background.

    2. Tile Servers

    Currently, Tracestrack has four high performance rendering servers and three caching edge servers. Following gives a rough DNS config:

  • US California node: US and Oceania.
  • Singapore node: Asia and Oceania.
  • London node, serving rest of the world.

    • 3. Tile Update Policy

    Most of the tiles are prerendered. With limited resources, it is difficult to keep an up-to-date map repository in short period of time, like OpenStreetMap.org does.

    Our strategy is to rerender only recently-accessed areas. We distinguish active and inactive areas. Active areas are rerendered approximately every 14 days. Inactive areas are rerendered in longer period, for example one month to six months.

    4. Map Style Updates

    We love to make our map style meet users' needs. If you want to render new tags or update current styles, let us know by mentioning @tracestrack on Twitter, or send us an email at info(at)tracestrack.com.

    The source code of Tracestrack Carto style is not open. We plan to make it open source in certain moment in future.

    We take issues and pull requests from openstreetmap-carto as sources to improve the maps. Following is a list of issues and PRs that influenced Tracestrack Carto style:

    • Fix shop=car_repair label/icon colour mismatch (brown) #4536
    • added rendering of amenity=parcel_locker #4512

    5. Artwork Credit

    6. Open Source Software and Data Credit

    • Servers: Debian and Ubuntu
    • Database: Postgres and PostGIS
    • Map render stack: mapnik, mod_tile, apache2
    • Map data: © OpenStreetMap contributors
    • Carto Map style: openstreetmap-carto
    • Topo Map style: OpenTopoMap
    • DEM data: SRTM
    • Spatial data processing: gdal