Before the time of web mapping maps have one style that was defined for the specified scale. Today it is normal to switch between different scale levels called “zoom levels“. The map always changes in some details: Important features remain and less important features disappear while zooming out. In the last years changed also the technologies. Nowadays, vector tiles are up to date and more suitable for many applications than the raster images based web mapping or tile services. This a good point in time to rethink the styles of web maps, because there are also new style file formats.

Your task is to review the map styles of OpenStreetMap and GoogleMaps. For OpenStreetMap it is also possible to access the style documents and take a closer look on some features. After that, you should describe possible strategies for developing a new map style for a vector based web map.

Finally, you should choose some features from OpenStreetMap and create a modern multiscale map style with vector web mapping technology applying you strategy for the creation of a new map style. We can provided you the basic knowledge for vector tiles and some examples to get started.

In the examples, you can see the city of Dresden on Openstreetmap.org in different zoom levels. Main routes stay while the residential road first getting smaller and finally disappear in the grey of the city area. Nevertheless, some other features change their colour like the forest for example.

Contact
Place: TU Dresden – Institute for Cartography
Supervisors: Prof. Dr.-Ing. Dirk Burghardt / M. Sc. Mathias Gröbe
Room: HÜL West 134 / HÜL West 140
Telephone: +49 351 463-36200 / +49 351 463-33099
Email: dirk.burghardt@tu-dresden.de / mathias.groebe@tu-dresden.de