about.html

---
layout: page
title: About the project
titlehtml: OpenMapTiles project overview
description: OpenMapTiles provides the fastest way how to setup custom styled world maps with open-source software. In a few minutes, you can have your own OpenStreetMap tileserver.
keywords: OpenMapTiles project, about, information, press release, icon, logo, website, basemaps
---

<div class="row article">
  <div class="col8 padx-0 pady-2">

    <p>OpenMapTiles provides the fastest way how to
      setup custom styled world maps with open-source software.
      In a few minutes, you can have your own OpenStreetMap tileserver - ready
      for use in your websites or products.</p>

    <p><strong>Just download the pre-generated tiles and get started</strong></p>

    <p>The project turns the publicly available OpenStreetMap data into
      ready-to-use packages containing vector tiles for the whole planet,
      individual countries and major cities. Downloaded map tiles can be
      displayed on websites with <a href="/viewers/">JavaScript viewers</a>,
      used in native <a href="/mobile/">mobile applications</a>
      on Android and iOS (even offline), or turned into traditional
      raster tiles or high-resolution images for printing.</p>

    <p>There are online guides to <a href="/docs/">get started</a>.</p>

    <p><strong>Open Map Styles & Open Tile Schema</strong></p>

    <p>We have prepared a set of beautiful <a href="/styles/">Open Map Styles</a>
      for our vector tiles.
      The styles are free and open-source, and you can adapt the design and code
      for your project or commercial product however you like. Either use one of
      our map styles directly as your base map or as a starting point for your
      own map design. You can also use an open-source
      <a href="/docs/style/maputnik/">visual map style editor</a>.</p>

    <p>Our new <a href="/schema/">Vector Tile Schema</a> is encoding the cartography
      decisions made on top of OpenStreetMap, Natural Earth
      and other OpenData sources and is 100%
      open and free to use, extend or build upon. We hope people will adapt,
      copy and reimplement our schema and data model in their projects while
      providing attribution.</p>

    <p><strong>Open-source tools and no vendor lock-in</strong></p>

    <p>The whole project is open-source, documented and comes with a license
      which is friendly even for business use (BSD + CC-BY).
      The project reuses existing open-source components and open standards
      from the OpenStreetMap &amp; FOSS community, Mapbox and other third parties.
      The work on the new open vector
      tile schema was done in cooperation with Paul Norman and Wikimedia
      Foundation and was initially modelled after the cartography of the Positron
      base map from Carto (former CartoDB), with their permission.</p>

    <p>With OpenMapTiles there is no lock-in to a single hosting platform
      or provider, and interested parties can adopt our workflow and do the
      tile generating as well as hosting completely independently and in-house.
      We <a href="https://openmaptiles.com">offer a set of services</a>
      and preprocessed data - including <a href="https://openmaptiles.com/contours/">worldwide
      contour lines</a> and <a href="https://openmaptiles.com/hillshades/">hill shading datasets</a>
      - to speed up the adoption of the project and applications in production use.

    <p>The OpenMapTiles project is a successor of OSM2VectorTiles, a project which
      won the OpenStreetMap innovation award of 2016 at SOtM in Brussels and which
      started in Switzerland as a student bachelor thesis
      at <a target="_blank" href="http://www.ifs.hsr.ch/Geometa-Lab.12520.0.html">HSR Rapperswil</a>
      in cooperation with <a target="_blank" href="https://www.klokantech.com">Klokan Technologies GmbH</a>.</p>

    <p><strong>Support and community</strong></p>

    <p>The team behind OpenMapTiles is available for
      <a href="https://openmaptiles.com/support/">commercial support and
        consulting</a> and can assist with deployment and applications of the maps
      in products and services. Contributions to the source code from the
      community are very welcome!</p>

  </div>
  <div class="col4 padl-3">
    <h4>Pictures for Press Usage</h4>
    <a href="/img/press/logo.png">
      <img src="/img/press/logo.png" alt="Project Logo">
    </a>

    <a href="/img/press/banner.png">
      <img src="/img/press/banner.png" alt="Project Logo">
    </a>

    <a href="/img/press/icons_with_map_background.png">
      <img src="/img/press/icons_with_map_background.png" alt="Icons with Map Background">
    </a>

    <p class="center">
      <a target="_blank" class="btn" href="https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0BwUe1kqIRJWScmdNbURyTVQ2Mlk?usp=sharing">Media kit</a>
    </p>
  </div>
</div>