Hiking/mri

This is the Maps.Refuges.Info rendering documentation page, a slippy map based on data from the OpenStreetMap contributors, I (sletuffe) am working on, targetting hikers. (Its old name was OpenHikingMap and can still be seen in some apps)

The first usable version was online around november 2008 but developpement of the style has almost stalled between 2013 and 2018. But in 2020 I have a new hope for improvement by incorporating OpenTopoMap additions.

Status of the maps.refuges.info service

• 2020-01-20 : Server running OK
• Datas are from 2023-06-15 (this information is manually updated if I don't forget !)

Coverage

Since 2020-01-15 it covers the world. Zoom levels are available from 0 to 18

Map Legend

• sac_scale=* is used with 3 levels (nothing-t1-t2 or t3-t4 or t5-t6). smaller the dash are, harder it is !
• trail_visibility=* is used with 2 levels (below intermediate or over bad) (red and some sort of pink/salmon )
• smoothness=* is used on tracks only. Support for use by unknown, cars ("bad" with 2 parallel lines), off roads vehicle ("very_bad" 1 line parallel with dashed line) , off highway vehicles ("horrible" and "very_horrible" with 2 parallel dashed lines)
• using highway=path path is rendered the same as footway in my styles
• highway=via_ferrata is rendered as black crosses looking like a chain
• boundary=protected_area is rendererd with a green border for protect_id 1 to 4
• Contours, hillshading and elevation color was composed and kindly provided by User:Yvecai from the OpenSnowMap project and based on :
  • ASTER GDEM is a product of METI and NASA
  • SRTM 1 Arc-Second Global
  • EU-DEM: Prroduced using Copernicus data and information funded by the European Union
  • France – RGE ALTI® 5m © IGN
  • Switzerland – Alti3D © swisstopo
  • US & Canada – NED 1arcsec U.S. Geological Survey
  • Austria – DHM 10m - CC-BY-4.0: Land Kärnten - data.gv.at
  • Italy – Tinitaly 10m – CC BY 4.0 Tarquini S., I. Isola, M. Favalli, A. Battistini, G. Dotta (2023). Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia (INGV).
  • Norway - DTM 10 Terrengmodell (UTM33) – CC BY 4.0 Kartverket

WARNING Data elevation model is approximative and may be wrong in mountains by a hundred meters, do not use it to place summits and do not trust it too much !

• Support for some extra POI with ele=* : tourism=viewpoint, natural=peak, natural=spring, mountain_pass=*, amenity=drinking_water tourism=alpine_hut tourism=wilderness_hut tourism=information place=locality place=isolated_dwelling amenity=parking
• Support for a lot of landcover surfaces ( landuse=meadow/grass/grassland/forest/wood/residential natural=grassland/wetland/bare_rock/scree/heath/scrub/glacier/water/beach)

• My improvement/suggestions/evolution page is Talk:Hiking/mri

Can it be used freely on another website/application ?

Usage policy

I have no problem with that. However, it is at your own risk, the service might stop any time, or I might ban abusing IP if there are too much requests. Please use the same terms of use as the main renderers as described here Tile usage policy

• Since 2011-07-26, due to increasing mass dowload applications targeting and hampering the mri server I had to take measures in order to give priority to "browsing users". The current limit is that asking more than 200 not allready rendered tiles or 3000 tiles (in cache or not) will get your connexion throttled to 1 Tile per 5 seconds or 1 per 20 seconds. I am sad to take such measures which could well lead to collateral damage but unfortunetly I haven't a strong enough server to handle that CPU load. (It has nothing to do with network bandwidth so offering cache space/proxy thing won't help much in this case)

TMS url

The TMS URL is at : https://maps.refuges.info/hiking/%z/%x/%y.png or (non https : http://maps.refuges.info/hiking/%z/%x/%y.png)

Questions/Suggestions/bug reports

In the talk page please. (The talk page is in my watch list, and I'll receive an email telling me that you want to contact me, watch out that if you checked the "minor" flag in your wiki comment I won't receive anything ) If it is technical, like you can't run import OSM data or the style won't load or documentation is laking better use the github issue tracker : [1]

Technical

base setup

The setup to reach this is by following

• Mapnik for the rendering (compatible with mapnik 3)
• Shaded relief maps using mapnik for contours and hillshading
• It uses mod_tile + tirex

Hardware

Current (2022) server hosting the map is :

• Xeon 4 cores/8 threads @2.8 Ghz
• 96 GB DDR3 ECC
• Hardware raid 5 of 4 12TB rotative disks (no ssd)
• ~2TB used (500GB for OSM data in Postgres + 300GB contours in Postgres + 200GB of various shape and tif files + ~600GB of Tiles)

Custom

If you are searching for the styles I use, the icons, the osm2pgsql import style, they are freely available on the mri github repository

Special tweaks

• OSM data layer are generated on demand if not in cache, so taking long in new visited areas
• OSM data old tiles from zoom 13 to zoom 18 are regenerated every time the database is updated in the area if the server as low load
• When a change in my styles occurs, everything is slooowly regenerated (1 month or more) so expect different tiles have different visuals

Frequently asked Questions

Garmin version ?

No, there isn't. Having a apache/tirex/mapnik/postgresql/osm data rendering stack is very different from having offline maps in a garmin, I don't plan on maintaining a Garmin version of this map

Off line version ?

See "usage policy" up here, it is possible, but since there are limits for downloads you will only be able to collect small areas.

See also

• List of OSM-based services