Diffable, more customizable maps

We’re excited to announce two improvements to mapping on GitHub today: diffs and feature-level customizations.

Visualizing changes over time

We added the ability to visualize geospatial data to GitHub last summer, but the true value of version control comes not from where your information is now, but how it’s changed over time, and where others propose it should be.

Starting today, any time you view a commit or pull request on GitHub that includes geodata, we’ll render a visual representation of what was changed. For example, here’s a diff of Illinois’s famed 4th congressional district after undergoing redistricting in 2011:

We’ll even diff properties within the geometry when they change:

Customizable maps

We’ve also made some changes under the hood to make mapping geoJSON files on GitHub faster and more customizable.

In addition to more-responsive, retina-ready maps, you can now customize individual features by specifying properties such as the fill color or opacity within the geoJSON file itself like the National Park Service did here:

We’ve implemented version 1.1.0 of the open simplestyle specification, so be sure to check out the full documentation for the details.

Happy collaborative mapping!

Written by

Ben Balter

@benbalter

Ben Balter is Chief of Staff for Security at GitHub, the world’s largest software development platform. Previously, as a Staff Technical Program manager for Enterprise and Compliance, Ben managed GitHub’s on-premises and SaaS enterprise offerings, and as the Senior Product Manager overseeing the platform’s Trust and Safety efforts, Ben shipped more than 500 features in support of community management, privacy, compliance, content moderation, product security, platform health, and open source workflows to ensure the GitHub community and platform remained safe, secure, and welcoming for all software developers. Before joining GitHub’s Product team, Ben served as GitHub’s Government Evangelist, leading the efforts to encourage more than 2,000 government organizations across 75 countries to adopt open source philosophies for code, data, and policy development.