In 2010, Stamen was awarded a Knight News Grant to build tools that help people tell better stories about cities. In 2014 we were awarded another grant from Knight to extend and support this project, as follows:
- Terrain layers, at all zoom levels, outside the US
- Transfer the hosting and processing to a cloud-based infrastructure to increase stability, scalability, server response and service levels, creating more reliability and confidence for those considering using the tile sets, & to allow for more frequent data updates
- Improving the accessibility and openness of the code base for the whole system
Our mission for this project is to collect the best available freely-available terrain datasets for the entire world, and developing the cloud-based tools and workflow to process that data. We also aim to produce some lovely lush terrain maps with the data.
This work requires finding and stitching together many different data sets. But what are they? Where are they? We need your help to make this global terrain map the best that it can be.
Were are collecting as many sources as possible on the project's wiki page, here.
We're posting updates & screenshots on our Tumblr, openterrain.tumblr.com. It's our hub for documenting this process publicly.
Get in touch! openterrain@stamen.com // @stamen