A city belongs in its landscape.
This pilot covers about 34 × 27 km around Maseru, Roma and Thaba Bosiu. Buildings, roads, rivers, named places and surface heights use one shared local geographic chart.
Local agreement is not verified VOC placement. This reuses the published Maseru anchor and approximate regional chart. The wider position, orientation and scale within World Map 2025 remain provisional. This is not a global geographic registration.
| Layer | Evidence and interpretation |
|---|---|
| Surface height | Copernicus GLO-30, resampled to roughly 33 × 35 m, at 1× height. This is a surface model, including some structures and vegetation, not surveyed bare earth. A 1.2 km joining belt meets the existing NOAA surface. |
| Inhabited areas | 161,438 valid mapped building polygons, plus roads and land use from a bounded OpenStreetMap extract dated 17 September 2026. This is community mapping, not an official survey or a complete census. |
| Building form | 2,527 larger footprints have simplified forms. Heights use tags or level estimates where available; most are visual estimates. Roof colours and road widths are generally interpreted. Architecture and bridges are not reconstructed. |
| Landscape appearance | Retained EOX Sentinel-2 cloudless imagery from 2016, combined with mapped outlines and interpreted material colours. It is archived appearance, not current land-cover evidence. |
| Places and landmarks | 463 place records and 91 named landmark records are retained in the shared chart. A mapped point is not a surveyed landmark footprint; individual historic structures have not been modelled. |
What changes in the workflow
Mapped settlements, roads, water and landmarks are checked before further detailed terrain construction. Unmapped ground stays unknown; a missing map record does not establish wilderness. We preserve source coordinates separately from display coordinates so a later registration correction moves the local layers together.
Sources, attribution and downloads
© OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database Licence (ODbL). The retained bounded extract and OSM-derived records and masks are available under the same licence: original extract, places, building forms, classification mask. Mask classes: 0 unknown; 1 mapped built/urban; 2 roads; 3 water; 4 public/landmark/park; 5 woody cover; 6 farmland. Point landmarks also require consulting the place records.
Copernicus elevation source and licence. Produced using Copernicus WorldDEM-30 © DLR e.V. 2010-2014 and © Airbus Defence and Space GmbH 2014-2018 provided under COPERNICUS by the European Union and ESA; all rights reserved. The organisations in charge of the Copernicus programme by law or by delegation do not incur any liability for any use of the Copernicus WorldDEM-30.
EOxCloudless by EOX IT Services GmbH; contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data 2016. Source · CC BY 4.0. Imagery was cropped, resampled and combined with attributed mapped features; the original tiles remain retained.
Machine-readable construction and source manifest · Return to the viewer