Launching the Facebook Map
By: Jonah Adkins
Tags: Facebook, Cartography, Maps, Design, Openstreetmap

At Stamen, we specialize in cartography and data visualization, helping our clients to communicate with complex data. In particular, we’ve spent almost two decades designing and building interactive web maps using open source tools, such as our popular Watercolor map style using OpenStreetMap data. For the past year and a half, it’s been our privilege to work on one of our largest and most ambitious undertakings ever: collaborating closely with a team of Facebook engineers, designers, and data experts to roll out a global, multi-scale base map for all of Facebook’s billions of users. In late 2020, this map went live, and we’re extremely proud of the results.

A Global Base Map

Facebook’s mission is to give people the power to build communities and bring the world closer together. Across the Facebook platform, maps are essential to bringing people together and are used in a variety ways, including checking in at a favorite park, searching a local community for cat cafes, or sharing location with friends.

just a few of the various places maps are used across Facebook

The Facebook map is a social map first and foremost. It’s meant to give a general sense of location through the lens of your community. Neighborhoods, parks, and social places are emphasized over “traditional” features like road networks.

Working as an embedded team with Facebook engineers allows us to bring cartographic experiences to the process of serving and scaling vector maps globally. This dynamic environment enables us to collaborate on data, tooling, and code around the entire map generation pipeline.

Part of what makes the map special is the team’s emphasis on open data to power this map. The primary data behind this map comes from OpenStreetMap (OSM), an open-source, global database of geographic features, often called “the Wikipedia of maps”. Without OSM, building this map would have been nearly impossible. Facebook recognizes the importance of open geographic data, and has become a major supporter of the OSM project. Facebook teams enhance existing OpenStreetMap data with quality and consistency checks from the Daylight mapping program, and even the data that is generated by FB internally, such as the building and road data from the mapwith.ai team is available to the OSM community through the RapiD tool. In addition to OpenStreetMap, at lower zoom levels our map builds on the foundation of Natural Earth, another open source curated dataset by and for cartographers (supported by Stamen and others over the years).

As cartographers and engineers, we are able to quickly iterate on this data on a global scale through a daily vector tile build. This feeds into our design process, which involves styling this data into the base map you see across Facebook apps. Before the map is released to the public, we work with Facebook’s quality assurance teams to ensure the map is free of bugs, glitches, and other unsightly data issues. Every week, we take an internal snapshot of the map for QA, with the goal of rolling out an updated map to the public every month, after it has been thoroughly reviewed.