OpenScienceMap

OpenScienceMap was a project at the University of Bremen, that as of 2020 appears to be completely abandoned. Its main goal was to create a platform that enables researchers to implement their ideas, to cooperate with others, and to share their results with everybody.

Vector rendering project

We are currently working on a vector-tile service, OpenGL ES map rendering on mobile devices and generalization of OpenStreetMap data for vector-tiles. Our research is focused on developing new methods for map interaction.

Direct access to our map: http:// opensciencemap. org/ map/
Do not access! Link leads to an online casino/game site as of January 2026.

Tile Server

Vector-tile are served from http://. opensciencemap.org/. tiles/vtm. .
Do not access! Link leads to an online casino/game site as of January 2026.

The format definition can be found at [1] Our infrastructure consists of:

• osm2pgsql planet import with minutely updates
• mod_tile with Tirex - managing tile cache and render queue
• TirexStache[2] - a Tirex backend that renders TileStache layers
• TileStache with OSciMap4[3] vector-tile provider

Client

• Android App - the upcoming 0.5 release is available from [4][5]
  • State Of The Map 2012: OpenScienceMap Vector Tile app for Android (abstract, link broken) - no slides, no video
  • OpenScienceMap: Open and Free Vector Maps for Low Bandwidth Applications - ACM DEV 2013 Conference Paper
• V^TM – cross-platform vector tile renderer. Development continues at https://github.com/mapsforge/vtm