World political map from OpenStreetMap data

Abstract

The paper presents the development of an automated procedure for creating a small-scale world political map from OpenStreetMap (OSM) data, and the map itself. A novel approach was used for cartographic processing, while the fitness for use of OSM data for this task was evaluated. It was anticipated and shown that creating a world political map from OSM data is a methodologically and technologically demanding task. The result was a political map of the world at a scale of 1:30,000,000, showing independent states, dependencies and areas of special sovereignty as in the OSM data set, with no adaptation to specific political recognition issues. A high degree of automation built on open-source software was achieved. The resulting map is an intermediate stage of production, requiring modest manual intervention for the final map. By allocating a code to the community (http://github.com/GEOF-OSGL/OSMPoliticalMap), we have provided opportunities for its continuing development.

Keywords

• World political map
• OpenStreetMap
• automated cartography
• map-making
• open-source software