I’ve often wondered why we don’t have a political map version. A lot of boundary mapping could be better displayed than the default map. We could show condominiums, boundary disputes, and other overlapping undefined areas. This would be mostly about the political aspect, we’d probably show some main features such as railways, roads, rivers and cities. But I think it would be unnecessary to show any other POIs.
And then if we like any of the styles, or the way they get rendered then we could port some over to the default map.
The idea of a separate political map also came up in response to requests for color-coding countries:
As noted in the comments on that issue, we now have a dedicated vector tileset for political boundaries as polygons, currently awaiting the first stylesheet or application to use it.
Annotating notable portions of territories, such as condominiums and annexations, would require us to map those areas explicitly. Some border disputes and conflict zones have been mapped as boundary=administrative relations. This isn’t quite correct because that tag is for territories of administrative areas, and we’d probably want to visually distinguish these areas from territories. New boundary=* values would be useful.
That is exactly the reason we need a political map. Most mappers map for the visually appealing over correctness. If we had a map style that supported all the weird map relations that are hard to render on a map, then they could map for the renderer and it would be correct.
One of the design strengths of many political maps is showing only a limited number of objects. When you try to build a map like these in OHM, the results highlight a current weakness with OHM’s “show everything” approach. The maps you shared only show a limited number of rivers, seas, and cities.
Any idea on how to approach the non-color-related issues with building maps like these from OHM?
I wonder if what we need isn’t a layer, but a lightweight editor of some sort. We could lock it down to a few key zoom levels, provide some options for projections, and a limited number of objects to include as a start. Ideally, we could create multiple maps, each with its own url. The could be used on their own, or embedded elsewhere.
Of course, there’d be issues with that, too… how do we ensure the underlying data doesn’t change underneath someone’s very pretty picture?
Or… maybe just a political map layer would be fine?
