5 ms·

The fastest way, if you don't have resources and don't mind being up to a few months behind, is to use OpenMapTiles vector tiles [1]. The download is an SQLite

The fastest way, if you don't have resources and don't mind being up to a few months behind, is to use OpenMapTiles vector tiles [1]. The download is an SQLite database with a standard-ish structure (MBTiles), you can either write a small server or use theirs. I needed vector tiles in other projections — WGS84 equirectangualar, an Arctic one, and an Antarctic one. Generating those took many hours on a cluster. [1] https://openmaptiles.com/downloads/planet/ https://openmaptiles.com/downloads/planet/

voxadam 8y ago
You mention being "a few months behind", what is the reason for this lag?
- MattBlissett 8y ago
  My apologies, I'm out-of-date with the commercial offerings of OpenMapTiles — I work on an open data project, eligible for OpenMapTiles' free license which has old (currently one year old) tiles. With a commercial license, the tiles are from 2 July. I assume the commercial tiles are a few days behind as it's just not worth most people's effort to stay up-to-the-hour — different map services can offer that, this company is making easy self-hosted map tile packages. The free license is presumably using older data to encourage an upgrade.
wpdev_63 8y ago
It's not comparable to OSM tiles as it's paid for licencing for commercial use.
- MattBlissett 8y ago
  That's correct — I'd forgotten that, as my project has the open data use license. However, as an example, the one-time $40 for Colorado is likely to be much cheaper than generating them yourself, and is probably adequate if you don't need to keep up to date.
spapas82 8y ago
Vector tiles is interesting and they are actually supported by GeoServer http://docs.geoserver.org/stable/en/user/extensions/vectortiles/tutorial.html http://docs.geoserver.org/stable/en/user/extensions/vectorti.... However I wasn't able yet to integrate them to my GeoServer installation. Has anybody else been able to try this?
- linsomniac 8y ago
  We are looking at moving to Vector tiles after the deployment of openstreetmap raster tiles is completed. We need to look at the performance closely though because on some devices it was slower with Vector tiles. I think we still want to go that direction we just have to quantify some of the performance.
  - spapas82 8y ago
    The difference between raster tiles and vector tiles is that in raster tiles the rendering (conversion to actual images) is done on your server (either when each tile is loaded for the first time or you may initialize a bunch of zoom levels for your area yourself; this may take hours to days depending on your area size) while for vector tiles you just send the descriptions/shapes and the inages are created on the client side. It is expected that the client performance won't be as good as with raster tiles and slow clients like mobile phones will struggle while trying to render the images. One interesting idea would be to have both raster and vector tiles; then in your client side code you could detect if the client is a mobile device or a desktop pc (I am not sure if you can detect more things about how speedy the device would be) and serve the corresponding tileset (ie the vector tileset if the device is desktop or the raster one if it is mobile). This way you will definitely decrease the load on your server and most clients won't have performance problems! In any case, the clients will get faster as the time passes so after some years vector tiles would probably be the norm because they have the huge advantage that it is very easy to style them on-the-fly in any way you like (while, to style raster images you need to re-create them all from scratch).
    - coderesearch 8y ago

voxadam 8y ago

You mention being "a few months behind", what is the reason for this lag?

MattBlissett 8y ago
My apologies, I'm out-of-date with the commercial offerings of OpenMapTiles — I work on an open data project, eligible for OpenMapTiles' free license which has old (currently one year old) tiles. With a commercial license, the tiles are from 2 July. I assume the commercial tiles are a few days behind as it's just not worth most people's effort to stay up-to-the-hour — different map services can offer that, this company is making easy self-hosted map tile packages. The free license is presumably using older data to encourage an upgrade.

wpdev_63 8y ago

It's not comparable to OSM tiles as it's paid for licencing for commercial use.

MattBlissett 8y ago
That's correct — I'd forgotten that, as my project has the open data use license. However, as an example, the one-time $40 for Colorado is likely to be much cheaper than generating them yourself, and is probably adequate if you don't need to keep up to date.

spapas82 8y ago

Vector tiles is interesting and they are actually supported by GeoServer http://docs.geoserver.org/stable/en/user/extensions/vectortiles/tutorial.html http://docs.geoserver.org/stable/en/user/extensions/vectorti.... However I wasn't able yet to integrate them to my GeoServer installation. Has anybody else been able to try this?

linsomniac 8y ago
We are looking at moving to Vector tiles after the deployment of openstreetmap raster tiles is completed. We need to look at the performance closely though because on some devices it was slower with Vector tiles. I think we still want to go that direction we just have to quantify some of the performance.
- spapas82 8y ago
  The difference between raster tiles and vector tiles is that in raster tiles the rendering (conversion to actual images) is done on your server (either when each tile is loaded for the first time or you may initialize a bunch of zoom levels for your area yourself; this may take hours to days depending on your area size) while for vector tiles you just send the descriptions/shapes and the inages are created on the client side. It is expected that the client performance won't be as good as with raster tiles and slow clients like mobile phones will struggle while trying to render the images. One interesting idea would be to have both raster and vector tiles; then in your client side code you could detect if the client is a mobile device or a desktop pc (I am not sure if you can detect more things about how speedy the device would be) and serve the corresponding tileset (ie the vector tileset if the device is desktop or the raster one if it is mobile). This way you will definitely decrease the load on your server and most clients won't have performance problems! In any case, the clients will get faster as the time passes so after some years vector tiles would probably be the norm because they have the huge advantage that it is very easy to style them on-the-fly in any way you like (while, to style raster images you need to re-create them all from scratch).
  - coderesearch 8y ago