For many year now I have been running a service at <a openstreetmapdata.com, first alone and then with the help of Christoph Hormann. We offered processed OSM data for download, most importantly coastline and Antarctic icesheet data. And although the service was always free to use and the software mostly Open Source, this was always our show. For a long time I wanted to change this and turn this into a proper OSM community project, and, finally, we have taken a big step towards that.

A year ago I released the first version of the OSMCoastline program that extracts and assembles coastlines from OSM data. Since then I have learned more about coastlines in OSM than I ever wanted to know, fixed numerous coastline bugs myself and added more features to the software. OSMCoastline has been in production use at Geofabrik and the German map server for more six months now.

I have written before about the mapping of Antarctia in OSM. Since then there has been a lot of activity. Christoph Hormann has prepared better Antarctica data for import and has documented the planned import extensively on the wiki. Peter Körner has created a web map in Polar Stereographic Projection.

OpenStreetMap wants to map the whole world, but there is a whole continent that has been neglected a bit: Antarctica. Of course there isn’t much there besides rocks, ice, and penguins and not too many people live there. But still, it is a huge area and it should appear properly on our maps.