OpenSnowMap.org - blog

The opensnowmap layer is getting ready for winter.

• Gladed, mogul and lit pistes are now rendered with appropriate icons
• Area pistes are now properly transparent for a better integration on top of topo layers
• Overall look of the layer is improved thanks to a better aliasing and smoothing of the pistes

Time to update the mapkey too:

Yves

A few improvements had been put online recently:

• Routing controls: intermediate points are now draggable. Double-click to delete.
• Permalink with marker: accessible from the menu, a permalink with marker let's you share a meeting point with your friends (example).
• Resorts shown from zoom 5 (site=piste).
• Relief layers on top of piste layer, to show the relief on pistes tagged as areas (Whistler.
• Openlayer 2.13.1.
• Replace Potlatch link with Id.
• Minor interface changes.

Bug corrections:

• HTML fix for ie8.
• fix pistes ofsetter tool (example).

Relations type=site, site=piste are used to map a 'ski ressort' or 'skiing area'.

There are relations grouping all winter sport features that are member of a particular ressort. Their name is rendered at intermediate zoom on Opensnowmap.org.

Creating relations site=piste not only allows to render nice and meaningful names on the map at low zoom, but it also come in handy when your are looking for a piste.

Let's say you are looking for a piste named 'sapin' (pine-tree in french). Not surprisingly, you will end up with a lot of results. However, now Opensnowmap.org gives you the results with a link to the resort name as tagged in the site=piste relation in which the piste is a member.

Handy, isn't it ? Well, there is only a few relations like this right now. But the good news is that building these relations is just armchair mapping ;)

For this, I strongly suggest the use of JOSM on bigger ressorts. Use Opensnowmap.org tiles as a background and search for "piste:type"=* or aerialway=* , the rest is your local knowledge to add the proper name.

Thanks to Osmdroid, it's relatively easy to build a simple map application for Android, so here it is :

Opensnowmap app on google play

It offers simple online map browsing and piste / place search by name. I hope it is more convenient to browse ski trails than on your mobile browser, though I know that in the future I should provide a proper web-based mobile version of the site.

Be warned : this application is a paid-for one, and is mainly intended to support for server costs. It's hard to find a good way to call for support, but I found this solution both practical for donations and useful. So, if you like Opensnowmap, don't hesitate to give it a try.

I prepared the sets of icons to render the following activities if they are present among the members of a site=piste relation:

• dowhnill
• nordic
• sled
• ice-skate
• jump
• playground
• skitour
• snow_park
• hike (snowshoes)

There is still a few placement issues, but it's overall looking good:

Now that the snow is slowly melting, that's something you can map remotely.

How-to site=piste.

Your new website, for all winter sports :

Menu:

• Tile server

From fresh data, every morning

• Pistes informations with a single clic

No more 'vector mode'. Lighter, better compatibility with browsers.

• Search for pistes by names

Nominatim results are augmented with a selection of ski pistes and lifts.

• Multi-modal routing and elevation profiles

You can climb dowhnills, take a lift downward and a shortcut in snowshoes. Yes !

• Forum

Yet another channel. It's more dedicated to newcomers, and aim to ensure the site viabilty in the long-term.

Maybe the site is a little fresh, so don't hesitate to send me your remarks.

J'ai rajouté quelques nouveautés sur le site récemment. Petit à petit, l'ensemble des activités hivernales sont couvertes.

* Snowparks, jardin de ski, pistes de luge, saut à ski et patinage sont sur la carte.

link

Vous saviez que l'on avait 851km de pistes de luge dans openstreetmap ?

* Recherche une piste par son nom

Le champ de recherche vous permet désormais de localiser une piste, une remontée ou un domaine skiable ('site=piste' relations) en plus des résultats classiques de Nominatim.

I had a few requests hanging in my mailbox, so here it is :

Rendering of alpine and crosscountry ski pistes, lifts, snowshoe / winter-hiking and skitour, updated daily.

To the map

Let see if yesterday's plots climb on, or if renderd says no :)

Tiles bulk downloading strictly forbidden

Thanks to newly released osm history dump and Peter's work on history Importer, I am able to extract a few figures out of our favorite hobby: mapping ski pistes.

* Crosscountry (nordic) ski

First XC trail was mapped in february 2006, the biggest effort was made during march 2011, with more than 1200 km mapped in a week.

* Alpine (downhill) ski

The first slope was mapped in february 2006 too, however the rise seems to flatten on the last years. Here 2009 is the best millesime.

* Aerialways (lifts)

It seems that aerialway mapping is less seasonal.

* And then

These three plots tend to grow at a steady pace, or even flattens a little.

We can probably understand this by the difficulty to map more remote pistes : it's time to improve the skiing level of our fellow ski-mappers :)

However, until they become really flat, one thing is sure: there is still plenty to map !

I added a basic printing function to the ski map. Choose the 'print' icon in the menu, then the area want to print.

The output is a pdf file and use Openstreetmap background. This feature is deliberately restricted to areas containing crosscountry ski trails, only two sizes are offered to avoid over-use.