Web Mapping with Vector Tiles using Open Source Tools

Free to run it

Free to modify it

Free to share it

Free to share your modification

Why Now?

Commons-based peer production

Tools

Bandwidth

Interest

Commons-based peer production (CBPP)

Yochai Benkler (2002), Harvard Law Professor

• New model of socio-economic production

• Collaborative efforts based on sharing information

• Large number of people working cooperatively usually over internet

• People participate because they are passionate about particular thing and revel in creating something new and better

Using internet to build rich valuable collections of knowledge & product

Flexible

Easy

Homogenous systems and single vendor strategies can be convenient BUT comes with trade-off. Lack of flexibility for fast adoption 

VS

FOSS4G: Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial

GIS 

Don Cooke, early digital mapping pioneer about the explosion in mapping technology. His comment: “After 20 years, it’s nice to be an overnight sensation”.​​

Companies are using maps not just as nice features but to drive revenue as core components of their offering. Maps are no longer just a good way to visualize content, they are core to competitive advantage.

Companies are thinking more creatively about how to combine location with outside content and internal business data to differentiate products

• Mapbox
• Deck.gl

Raster

• Image format(png, jpg)
• Styled before loading
• Specific zoom levels

Vector

• Protobuf format, includes geo data
• Styled after loading
• Unlimited zoom level

Map Tiles

Vector Tiles & Web Mapping

Raster Tiles

• Don't Scale
• Hard to change
• Just Pictures, not data

ArcMap

ArcGIS Server

Common Enterprise GIS Workflow

Vector Tiles

Packet of geographic data packaged into pre-defined, roughly-square shape tiles which vector data has been clipped to the boundaries of each tile... benefits of pre-rendered raster map tiles with vector map data"

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Title Text

Title Text

Title Text

Vector Tiles

Similar to raster tile except it returns vector representation of feature in the tile.

• Scales
• Easy to change
• Smart data

Vector Tiles

Google Protocol Buffers

language-neutral, platform-neutral extensible mechanism for encoding structred data"

Similar to xml except smaller, faster and simpler

.pbf  or .mvt (mapbox vector tile)

Smart Data!

Easy To Change!

Raster vs Vector Tiles

Power of Vector Tiles

Five County Parcels Polygons - Demo 

• King, Pierce, Snohomish, Island, Kitsap
• 1.2 million polygons
• shp 730 MB -> 90 MB vector tiles

Quick Demo 1

WHOA!

Power of Vector Tiles

Building Footprints Demo

WA Building Footprints - 1 million buildings

CA Building Footprints - 4 miillion buildings

• Source: 9.8 million building by Microsoft hand digitized footprint with heights

Quick Demo 2

WHOA!!

Another new new thing???

Workshop Workflow

Docker Container

 (1) Preparing Data

GDAL/OGR

Geospatial Data Abstraction Library

Command line utilies for data processing and data translation

Convert shape file to GeoJson

(2) Creating Vector Tiles

Tippecanoe

How-to-use

GeoJSON --> *.mbtiles

(3) Rendering Vector Tiles

Tileserver-gl

Open Source Vector Tile server with options

Many Alternative Options

(4) Styling Vector Tiles

Maputnik

Free and Open Source visual style editor for designer and developers

• ​Can Run locally

Mapbox Studio

Commercial visual style editor for designer and developers & so much more...

"First do it, then do it right, then do it better."

Doing is Learning, but...

Doing with mistakes?

It's still learning!

SO, Here We GO!