Cadence Maps is a new cloud-native data service (currently in the prototype stage) for distributing OpenStreetMap (OSM) data in the Germany-Austria-Switzerland-Liechtenstein1 region as GeoParquet files using a unified schema (following the pattern of the Overture Maps Foundation (OMF)). The goal of Cadence2 Maps is to make OSM data more readily available for analysis. The platform is the product of a Bachelor’s thesis at the University of Applied Sciences Eastern Switzerland (OST).
Currently, Cadence Maps offers OSM data on administrative boundaries and POIs3, “compatible with Overture Maps”4 and accessible via a static web interface from S3 object storage. The data can be queried directly using tools such as DuckDB and SQL or Python. The production pipeline and backend of Cadence Maps relies on open-source tooling.
Future plans include refining taxonomy and data issues, benchmarking, and turning the prototype into a weekly updated offering.
There is a longer introductory article by Stefan Keller with some interesting points also regarding OMF data. An in-depth description of perceived shortcomings of OMF and a comparison of OMF and Cadence Maps data could be interesting.
Footnotes
Colloquially, this region can be called “D-A-CH-LI” in German (as does the original post) – as a contraction of the countries’ abbreviations.↩︎
According to Wikipedia, “in Western musical theory, a cadence is the end of a phrase in which the melody or harmony creates a sense of full or partial resolution, especially in music of the 16th century onwards.”↩︎
Points-of-interest↩︎
From what I have read, it didn’t become quite clear to me, if “compatible” refers to the data categories or, more deeply, to the schema / data model. And I haven’t yet had time to investigate the data.↩︎