Last update: Thursday March 2 2023
Information
Company
Tracestrack is a sole proprietorship (eenmanszaak)
registered in the Netherlands (KvK 87031469, VAT NL004347242B39). Its focus is openstreetmap
based raster map rendering and hosting.
Our contact information:
Email: info@tracestrack.com
Twitter: @tracestrack
Products
- Base maps: Carto and Topo
- Language labels: 18+ languages
- Route overlays: bus, bicycle, subway and train.
To explore all
maps that we offer, please
visit
Map Explorer.
Why raster maps
Raster maps are mature and easy to support on mobile/desktop apps and websites. With 512px tile size, maps
can also be sharp on HD screens. Raster maps can show more
details on low zoom than vector. When raster data sources,
such as hillshades and satellite data is
involved, raster map may also perform better than vector maps.
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 are visible 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
- City districts: place=borough
- Sea and ocean: place=seaplace=ocean
- 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
- Pitch sport icons: leisure=pitch
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 Carto style background.
2. Tile Servers
Currently, Tracestrack has three high performance
rendering servers and three edge servers.
Our DNS routes traffic to the best available edge
servers. There is failover setup to improve
availability.
See
DNS
Checker for real time config.
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 a short period of time, like
OpenStreetMap.org does.
The update mechanism includes three parts:
- 2-day updates: based on countries, enabled for "IT,
AU, NZ, HU, CN, TW, NL, LU, BE, FR, GB", triggered by map
data changes. Only for Carto(base) and default language layer(_-name). Become a paying customer to include another country!
- 21-day updates: recently accessed areas.
- longer updates (up to six months): non-recently accessed areas.
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: PostgreSQL and PostGIS
- Map rendering: mapnik, mod_tile, apache2
- Map data: © OpenStreetMap contributors
- Carto Map style: openstreetmap-carto
- Topo Map style: OpenTopoMap
- DEM data: SRTM and NASADEM
- Land cover data: ESA Worldcover
- Data processing: gdal