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Extracting OpenStreetMap data for region highlights compatible with OpenMapTiles

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Extracting OpenStreetMap data for region highlights compatible with OpenMapTiles
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12
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CC Attribution - NonCommercial - NoDerivatives 4.0 International:
You are free to use, copy, distribute and transmit the work or content in unchanged form for any legal and non-commercial purpose as long as the work is attributed to the author in the manner specified by the author or licensor.
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Want to show Hubei Province (China) on an OpenMapTiles map? This talk shows how to extract region polygons for the entire planet from OpenStreetMap. Mapbox Vector Tiles are an established standard to create web maps with custom styling. They contain minimal data for rendering a base map, which includes boundaries between regions (countries and subdivisions) but not polygons of the regions themselves. So we can draw boundaries as needed, but we lack the data to highlight one specific region, which is a recurring need in data visualization. We wanted our highlighted regions to line up nicely with the boundaries on the base map, so we set out to extract compatible data from OpenStreetMap. The process, which uses various existing Open Source solutions and services (Overpass API, mapshaper, tippecanoe) will be presented in this talk. The result is an open dataset of regions which cover the entire planet. In our locator map tool, this dataset allows reporters and editors, who are not GIS experts, to highlight regions with a few simple clicks. These maps are routinely used in the online and print editons of the NZZ newspaper.