Are there are any tools that your GIS students use to create this? Or is it all code? Any libraries that you can recommend?
I was thinking that I would query the global database for roads and then take the nodes and their coordinates. Then I would need to convert those coordinates into points on a canvas and draw lines between them.
How would I get the boundaries of a city? Some places I've tried are just a point in osm. Is there some other data source you would use for that?
A combination of overpass turbo and a LLM would get you started pretty quick.
Regarding GIS tools, download QGis (it sucks on mac but is okay on linux or windows)
QGIS on many platforms for the fact that - its 1 CPU-bound, does not facilitate Spatial SQL and does not partition data when loading so-called attribute tables. Literally not useful for layers with more than 500k features. Already addressed many times in their issues on github, the short answer is - it will take ages to rewrite it.
It is perhaps too much to say, but QGIS is a dead-end for GIS systems in its current form. Russians branched 2.x into something called NextGIS btw.
PostGIS with some middleware and Leaflet is more than enough. The rest is integration of data.
OSM is for data, the visualisation lib that is easiest to get right is the Leaflet. You can of course also use OpenLayers.
Most layers on this project are perhaps freely available already. If you need to map objects - QGIS is a free tool and there are plenty of segmentation algos. MMQGIS can geocode datapoints scratched from APIfy.
Btw, those who downvoted my comment must be really ignorant about the area of GIS. I find no other explainarion.
I was thinking that I would query the global database for roads and then take the nodes and their coordinates. Then I would need to convert those coordinates into points on a canvas and draw lines between them.
How would I get the boundaries of a city? Some places I've tried are just a point in osm. Is there some other data source you would use for that?