

Vector Tiles for MapBox Streets - incanus77
http://mapbox.com/blog/vector-tiles/

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nodesocket
Good god, their design is amazing. Visually it is just beautiful to look at
and ascetically pleasing. Is it based on any framework or library?

<http://mapbox.com>

And the tour:

<http://mapbox.com/tour/>

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ManAboutCouch
Their MapBox.js library is a plugin for the increasingly popular Leaflet.js
mapping library: <http://mapbox.com/mapbox.js/api/v1.0.2/>

As an aside, MapBox (via funding from the Knight Foundation) is also behind
the shiny new iD Editor for OpenStreetMap: <http://ideditor.com/>

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BaconHunter
I'm confused. Are the tiles meant to be delivered in a vector format? Their
demo was using pngs...

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fpp
Yes, would be great to see a live example of client rendered tiles.

I believe their ProtoBuffer approach sounds promising and their position in
the mapping / OSM community is strong enough to get this to some kind of
standard.

Have seen a few client vector-based approaches before. 2 of the better ones:

<https://github.com/jywarren/cartagen>

MapDroyd - was a product of OneStepAhead - now seemingly part of Cloudmade (
<http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/MapDroyd> \- still in Google Play with
screenshots etc search for MapDroyd )

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aw3c2
Don't forget OruxMaps and OSMAnd (capitalisation as you like it). Both are
Android apps that support vector data as well.

Also KothicJS, a JS renderer.

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richard_ted
Given the spat at OGC with regard to Geoservices REST API, its high time that
we ditch OGC and start a clean standardization body. We need futuristic
standards and that can take the geospatial industry forward, not as in ESRI. I
see that the team at Mapbox is ideal for that and lets hope that can take the
lead

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Demiurge
Where can I find more info about this "spat"?

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ManAboutCouch
The 'spat' broke out on the OGC Mailing list, here's the May Archive:
<http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/discuss/2013-May/> There are about 100
messages about it on there.

There's also this Open Letter:
[http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Geoservices_REST_API#Open_Letter_...](http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Geoservices_REST_API#Open_Letter_to_OGC_and_voting_members)

And James Fee's view on the whole thing:
[http://spatiallyadjusted.com/2013/05/09/esri-and-an-ogc-
stan...](http://spatiallyadjusted.com/2013/05/09/esri-and-an-ogc-standard/)

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acanby
_> Now with hundreds of millions of map views across thousands of subscribers,
the stability and scalability wins are clear_

I'd also be interested to see a write up on these aspects, what are the gains
here... 10%? 10x? 100x?

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unwind
I wondered, too. Luckily, there's some hard data further down in the post:

 _[...] highly optimized, slim enough to fit the entire world onto a single
USB stick._

Now that the exact size is known (1 world/stick), it's easy to get a feel for
how this new format is better than the old alternatives, right? Grumble.

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tmcw
On a stick, the world (via OSM) is around 33GB. It's 300+GB in PostGIS, so
about a 10x win.

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unwind
Thanks! That _really_ should have been in the post, glad to finally get some
closure.

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untog
This looks phenomenal. Anyone that's interested in online maps and hasn't
taken a look at TileMill owes it to themselves to take a look.

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micro_cam
Very cool and I' definitely going to dig into this.

For my use (topographic maps) the ability to combine this on the client side
with tiled raster data for thing where that makes sense (ie grey scale
elevation, their satellite layers etc) would make this a killer platform.

I already have code to do slope angle overlays client side by applying an
image transformation to elevation data in a canvass [1] which could be used
for hill shading etc but the only available web services are slow, query
(instead of tile) base, and use poorly defined encodings.

[1] The "Custom Slope Analysis" tool for identifying avalanche prone slopes on
hillmap.com

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hayksaakian
Correct me if I'm wrong,

Their unique value proposition is a platform for styling maps?

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ewolfe
Styling maps is just an added feature. Their main uvp is simply "maps".
Competitor and alternative to Google Maps, Mapquest, etc.

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buro9
And there is also CloudMade as a choice for those seeking not to use Google
Maps, Mapquest, Bing, etc.

<http://cloudmade.com/>

Both Cloudmade and MapBox use OpenStreetMap data. Leaflet (
<http://leafletjs.com/> ) was created by Cloudmade and is the JavaScript lib
for putting tiled maps on the web. Mapbox have their own version of Leaflet,
but it's essentially much the same if all you want to do it drop pins, work
with layers, choose a tile set.

Both are comparable, and both are strong in the same space: Custom styled,
tiled maps. And both are weak in the same place: routing.

Not to say that they don't do routing, but it's certainly not their forte.

Thankfully the majority use-case for most sites and applications using maps is
simply "show a map, drop a few pins here and there". So having this map look
and feel like the site is actually a good selling point.

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Sprint
I expect routing to become more prevalent in the OSM world thanks to the
fantastic <http://project-osrm.org/> project.

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buro9
That's surprisingly good. As in; for a complex route across London and
factoring in one-way streets it produces something that looks realistic.

Only allowed me to pick car as a mode of transport, and unrealistically
suggested I could get across 14KM of central London in 14 mins, but ignoring
those things this is very nice.

Would love to see the path output of this added to Leaflet and a standard form
of API emerge for Mapbox, Cloudmade, Google Maps, etc.

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Doctor_Fegg
I, ahem, might be working on a UK cycling router using OSRM ;)

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ManAboutCouch
Have you seen CycleStreets: <http://www.cyclestreets.net/>

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Doctor_Fegg
Yep. It's great. This one will aim at a different market, really.

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urbanbiker
Interesting. What other market is there though? They do different confidences
of cyclists and leisure routes already?

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joelcarranza
Very nice work. I look forward to seeing where they go with this. I am curious
as to how they handle polygons that span multiple tiles. If they take the
rather straightforward approach of taking any polygon and splitting it up to
fit in each respective tile, that has all sorts of implications for styling.
Imagine you want to draw a building as a solid color and then draw the outline
in some secondary color. What happens if the building falls on a tile
boundary?

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vidarh
Without having looked at this implementation (but I know a startup doing
something similar for an internal system): You add a suitably sized "buffer".
So e.g. if your maximum stroke width is 20, you clip the polygon with an
accordingly large margin. There are still potential caveats, e.g. if you want
to allow changing automated label placement based on shapes etc., but the
potential win is still massive even if you have to put some minor restrictions
on what type of restyling can be done without having to "re-render" into
vector tiles - this way at least most typical restyling such as changing
colours or stroke widths can be done trivially.

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sakai
As always, very beautiful work. Congratulations and thank you for contributing
this back to the OSGEO community.

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terhechte
Does somebody know if there's a way to use these with one's own OSM server?

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dbaupp
There is code on GitHub[1], although it emphasises "experimental" and
"unsupported".

[1]: <https://github.com/mapbox/tm2>

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dwightgunning
TileMill is the desktop app for designing/styling maps. It'll export to
various formats, but primarily geared for upload to Mapbox's hosted map
service (free and paid plans that are well worth it imo - just a happy
customer).

For std image files, Mapbox make source available for their TileStream server
(<https://github.com/mapbox/tilestream>). Not sure if/when it'll get support
for the raster images.

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lostpixel
Very nice, pricing seems pretty good too imho

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chii
This is pretty cool.

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bliker
still waiting for the reverse geocoder

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yellowbkpk
Use Nominatim.

Reverse geocode:
[http://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/reverse?format=json&l...](http://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/reverse?format=json&lat=48.976344&lon=9.6533239)

Forward geocode:
[http://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/?format=json&q=1600%2...](http://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/?format=json&q=1600%20pennsylvania%20washington%20dc)

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ygmpkk
Nice

