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Protomaps – A free and open source map of the world

• tschoffelen 3y ago
  We actively use this at Street Art Cities (https://streetartcities.com https://streetartcities.com). Really helped keep hosting costs down for a project that is more community than commercial, and created a more cohesive experience. Little blog post here: https://schof.co/moving-over-street-art-cities-to-pmtiles-and-maplibregl https://schof.co/moving-over-street-art-cities-to-pmtiles-an...
• keepamovin 3y ago
  For a while I've wanted an SVG map with a JS API where you can input latitude and longitude and show the point on it. I hope this will do that! The reason I want that is, almost all humans have a GPS device in their pocket. You could easily get your approximate location from this, even without cell service. Implementation could be a PWA.
  • jack_riminton 3y ago
    But protomaps is still getting the map data from a CDN, do you mean that the map data would be cached on the device?
    • keepamovin 3y ago
      Yes. With the tradeoff that it would be radically simplified.
  • wiredfool 3y ago
    Your best bet for this is something like OsmAnd or organic maps, which download countries worth of osm data and make it available offline. The amount of map data for any reasonable area is going to be too large for a PWA, though it would technically be possible to do with existing map viewers and this format. (Eg maplibre or leaflet)
    • keepamovin 3y ago
      Thanks. I'm OK with a single layer just showing the outlines of coastlines and regions, including the names of regions. I think a suitable simplified world map could fit all this in SVG. edit: Initially underestimated so did some calculations below Key Data Points for Estimate of SVG Size - Radius of Earth: 6371 km - Surface Area of Earth: 510e6 km^2 - Approximate Number of Countries: 250 - Land Area of Earth: 29% of Surface Area = 150e6 km^2 Corrections and Estimations Based on Average Country Size - Average Land Area per Country: 150e6 km^2 / 250 = 6e5 km^2 - Country Closest to Average Size: Ukraine, with 603550 km^2, or roughly 6e5 km^2 - World Resources Institute Measure of Ukraine Coastline: 4953 km, or around 5e3 km Assumptions for SVG Complexity 1. Only coastlines matter for the paths. 2. Resolution set at 10 meters. SVG Data Calculations and Estimates - Coastline Points for Average Country: - 5e3 km = 5e6 m - Equals 5e5 X,Y points (at 10m resolution) - Total Points for All Countries: - 250 countries * 5e5 points = 1.25e8 X,Y points - Storage Requirement for Each Point: - 6 figures per coordinate + delimiters = roughly 15 bytes - Total Storage = 1.25e8 points * 15 bytes = ~1.875e9 bytes or about 1.875 GB Even with a simplified approach, we're looking at an SVG that'd be almost 2 GB, just for coastlines at a 10m resolution. Definitely some hefty complexities in play here. What about 1000m resolution? 20 megabytes. Much more achievable.
      • Someone 3y ago
        I would expect border length scales with the square root of country area, so smaller countries have disproportionally longer borders than larger ones. There also must be more countries smaller than the average country than there are larger ones (https://www.worldometers.info/geography/largest-countries-in-the-world/ https://www.worldometers.info/geography/largest-countries-in... confirms that. Ukraine is 45th of 223, or about 20% down.) So, I guess yours is underestimating the size. You probably get a better estimate by using the Ukraine to estimate the scaling constant (√603,550km²)÷4953km and then use a list of land areas to estimate border lengths.
        • keepamovin 3y ago
          I like your refinements! I may take a look at reviewing the estimate later! Thank you for making this contribution, it's really valuable that you share your intuitive statistical knowledge here :)
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• INTPenis 3y ago
  Usually .com domains were used by commercial entities, and protomaps.com seems like it might have cost some money. I don't fully understand LLC except that they protect owners from company liability. Just trying to figure out what the goal for this company is.
  • geokon 3y ago
    https://protomaps.com/faq https://protomaps.com/faq They seem to be explicitly noncommercial
    • bdon 3y ago
      I'd like to correct that impression - Protomaps is an explicitly commercial venture. The difference from other commercial vendors is the focus on a complete, easily deployable solution - the hosted API is meant for non-commercial and light commercial use, instead of being the main product offering, to avoid the incentive trap of locking-in paying users to the API. A related concept is the Community Right to Replicate: https://2i2c.org/right-to-replicate/ https://2i2c.org/right-to-replicate/
  • executesorder66 3y ago
    > Usually .com domains were used by commercial entities I must disagree. Even in the early days, even though that was the intended use of the .com TLD, it has always actually been used as the default TLD instead of the .net TLD. I really hate it, but whenever I see a .com I have never, and will never assume it has some sort of commercial angle.
    • Chabsff 3y ago
      The head-scratcher is more like: If it's a non-profit, they (and I) would have expected a .org, which, unlike .net, has been used consistently over the years. But I get your point in general.
      • lionkor 3y ago
• dhumph 3y ago
  Not sure if op is affiliated, but I recommend increasing the font size of the street names as you zoom in. Look forward to using this in the future
  • globular-toast 3y ago
    In theory you could do that yourself with a vector basemap. Wouldn't it be great if browser minimum font size applied to absolutely everything (ie. minimum font size actually means "I cannot read anything below this size so never render it like that").
  • wolverine876 3y ago
    That is a constant problem on Google's and Apple's phone maps. The names are almost unreadable to many people I've encountered with vision in the normal range of issues (e.g., wear glasses, etc.).
    • Reason077 3y ago
      Apple Maps does respect the "text size" system setting. All the text including street names will go very big if you want them to!
• bcks 3y ago
  I lurk in an online community of journalist coders and some folks there are excited about PMTiles as cost-saving way to host your own custom-styled map tiles. See, for instance, "How The Post is replacing Mapbox with open source solutions" https://www.kschaul.com/post/2023/02/16/how-the-post-is-replacing-mapbox-with-open-source-solutions/ https://www.kschaul.com/post/2023/02/16/how-the-post-is-repl...
  • loughnane 3y ago
    Sounds like a neat community. Can you share where it is?
    • bcks 3y ago
      Sure thing, check out NICAR-L: https://www.ire.org/resources/listservs/ https://www.ire.org/resources/listservs/
  • wolverine876 3y ago
    How do the publications know this data is accurate?
    • lmeyerov 3y ago
      Most of these piggyback on the OSM for the data tier, which $T companies work on. Afaict the discussion is more about compute on top - tile generation, interactive renderers, ... .
      • wolverine876 3y ago
        $T companies aren't a source of truth. Much of journalism is reporting on their errors, including the intentional, reckless, and lazy kinds.
        • ummonk 3y ago
          What would you suggest the publications use instead? Maps from billion dollar companies!
• AlbertoGP 3y ago
  For me the most interesting part is “PMTiles”: > PMTiles is a single-file archive format for pyramids of tiled data. A PMTiles archive can be hosted on a storage platform like S3, and enables low-cost, zero-maintenance map applications. > PMTiles is a general format for tiled data addressed by Z/X/Y coordinates. This can be cartographic basemap vector tiles, remote sensing observations, JPEG images, or more. > PMTiles readers use HTTP Range Requests to fetch only the relevant tile or metadata inside a PMTiles archive on-demand. > The arrangement of tiles and directories is designed to minimize the amount of overhead requests when panning and zooming. https://docs.protomaps.com/pmtiles/ https://docs.protomaps.com/pmtiles/
  • wiredfool 3y ago
    Pmtiles are the vector counterpart to Cloud Optimized GEOTIFF (COG), allowing for efficient usage of mapping info from clients when the server supports a http range request. Previous iterations of this on the vector side have either been a ton of small files(pbf) or a large file that needed a front end to serve the individual tiles (mbtiles). At this point, you can take an OSM dump and convert it to a country level basemap in minutes on a stout machine, or hours for a continent, which you can then self host on a plain old web server with a custom style sheet.
    • bdon 3y ago
      Generating country level basemaps from scratch is a great approach! I've made an even easier path which is to just extract the relevant tiles from a daily build: https://docs.protomaps.com/guide/getting-started https://docs.protomaps.com/guide/getting-started This can take seconds to minutes for small-medium areas and doesn't need a powerful computer at all. The drawbacks are that the build is only daily, and the lower-zoom tiles aren't clipped so include extra information beyond your specified area.
      • mycall 3y ago
        I've been using TileServer GL for a while and it looks like there is support for pmtiles coming soon. https://github.com/maptiler/tileserver-gl/pull/1009 https://github.com/maptiler/tileserver-gl/pull/1009
• robertlagrant 3y ago
  > The Google Maps API has a generous free tier, but high fees past 30,000 map loads. Protomaps is designed from the ground up to be a system you run yourself - as a 100% static backend on cloud storage - so you only incur the usage costs of storing and serving that data, which can be pennies for moderate usage. It would be interesting to see a cost comparison: recommended hosting setup vs Google Maps, and at what point the line intersects.
  • elaus 3y ago
    I haven't found this info in the FAQ, but it would be interesting to know how large that PMTiles file is for a medium-sized country. It seems to be a really attractive way of self-hosting maps that don't have to be 100% up to date and are only used in a specific region. "Recompiling" that file once a year and uploading it to a static file hoster would be an easy process with very little external dependencies. Edit: Found the official download link[1] for the whole world, which is a bit over 100 GB. So I guess the answer to my question would be "hundreds of MB to a few GB", which seems totally fine. [1] https://docs.protomaps.com/basemaps/downloads https://docs.protomaps.com/basemaps/downloads
    • robertlagrant 3y ago
      That's true - I suppose the cost changes depending on the size of the area you're mapping. Maybe a representative set? A city (e.g. Johannesburg), a small country (e.g. UK), and a large country (e.g. USA)?
      • wiredfool 3y ago
        Monaco is 500k, Ireland +NI is 400M, and Europe is 40G, for their basemap output. (Representative numbers from my runs)
    • Doctor_Fegg 3y ago
      Geofabrik already does this for vector tiles of each country, but as individual mvt files rather than in a container like pmtiles or mbtiles. http://download.geofabrik.de/ http://download.geofabrik.de/
• blutack 3y ago
  If anyone else was curious, their sample OSM derived PMTile file (protomaps-basemap-opensource-20230408.pmtiles) is 103GB. https://docs.protomaps.com/basemaps/downloads https://docs.protomaps.com/basemaps/downloads
  • pmontra 3y ago
    It's 107 GB now. It would be great to be able to download only diffs and apply them to a daily, weekly, monthly baseline.
    • blutack 3y ago
      Hmm I was just going off the Firefox estimate, maybe there's some browser difference?
      • bdon 3y ago
        The newest major version has moved to a daily build channel (the last major version was last updated in April) Today 10/23 is 107GB. https://maps.protomaps.com/builds/ https://maps.protomaps.com/builds/ I'll update the documentation page today.
        • bdon 3y ago
          (I've updated the page at https://docs.protomaps.com/basemaps/downloads https://docs.protomaps.com/basemaps/downloads)
    • mycall 3y ago
      I wonder if the compressed Hilbert ordering inside the tiles make them hard to diff efficiently.
      • bdon 3y ago
        The ordering applies across tiles, and not within - it should be efficient to diff two archives because there is a single, well-defined ordering over the entire archive, and writing algorithms over the tileset is all 1D operations instead of 2D (a single zoom level plane) or 3D (multiple planes)
• ulrischa 3y ago
  Cool but basemaps are a very tricky thing from a geographers perspective. There are several border conflicts. When it is open source there could be some manipulation. Immediatelly getting downvoted. All I'm saying is that official map boundaries these days should be used. Because I can again not post because too fast here my clarification: I mean official not commercial or proprietary
  • hapulala89 3y ago
    This is so true. Otherwise all Mapping authorities would be useless. I could change my house ground area and nobody cares
  • ulrischa 3y ago
    For all who downvotes. Here is the prof that leaving Mapping borders open source is not the way: https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/r1hyeammt https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/r1hyeammt
  • Maxion 3y ago
    That's quite the edge case, though. This is exceedingly useful for so many use cases. E.g. internal tools that display locations of assets, system statuses, webpages that display store locations, and so forth. Plenty of use cases where the costs for Googles APIs would exceed the dev costs for implementing something like this.
  • maxerickson 3y ago
    A commercial data provider can also be showing a manipulated border, and is at least making some kind of editorial decision about what they are showing (whether they think so or not).
    • JimDabell 3y ago
      For instance: Why isn't my time zone highlighted on the world map? > In early 1995, a border war broke out between Peru and Ecuador and the Peruvian government complained to Microsoft that the border was incorrectly placed. Of course, if we complied and moved the border northward, we’d get an equally angry letter from the Ecuadorian government demanding that we move it back. So we removed the feature altogether. > The time zone map met a similar fate. The Indian government threatened to ban all Microsoft software from the country because we assigned a disputed region to Pakistan in the time zone map. (Any map that depicts an unfavorable border must bear a government stamp warning the end-user that the borders are incorrect. You can’t stamp software.) We had to make a special version of Windows 95 for them. — https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20030822-00/?p=42823 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20030822-00/?p=42...
• globular-toast 3y ago
  I wonder if Github Pages supports HTTP range. Obviously putting a multi-GB blob on there would probably be abuse, but a small blob limited to a small region with limited detail would be really nice for having a map to accompany a blog post or something.
  • bdon 3y ago
    It does, but there is a limit of something like 500 MB for single files.
    • globular-toast 3y ago
      It would be cool to have an automatic tool to generate a blob of any size and it would include as much detail as possible within your given blob size limit...
      • bdon 3y ago
        You can kind of do that already with the pmtiles CLI: pmtiles extract INPUT.pmtiles OUTPUT.pmtiles --bbox=BBOX --maxzoom=Z --dry-run --dry-run will output the total size of the final archive without downloading any tiles, so you can adjust the maxzoom from the default of 15 (for basemaps) until it fits under your limit
  • wcedmisten 3y ago
    I used it for this hospital accessibility map of Maryland. Sorry the legend looks terrible on mobile though https://wcedmisten.github.io/nextjs-protomap-demo/isochrone https://wcedmisten.github.io/nextjs-protomap-demo/isochrone
• CSSer 3y ago
  I’ve contributed to this project, and we use it in production at work! It’s great. Brandon is very nice, and I really appreciate all the work that has been put into this.
• toinewx 3y ago
  how did you deal with the china map part? AFAIK it is illegal to distribute accurate geographical data about China without their authorization. You can distribute the one that is slightly inaccurate, such as what provides google maps or apple maps for non chinese users
  • harrymit907 3y ago
    Illegal in what jurisdiction? I suppose only in China?
• mberg 3y ago
  I've been an avid Mapbox user since getting alpha access to Tilemill. From my perspective, this is the most important contribution to the open mapping space since the introduction of vector tiles and Mapbox GL / Map GL. Mapbox in my opinion left the door open in how they approached tile baking with MTS. While powerful it was way to confusing and expensive. While you could always bake tiles with Tippecanoe you still had to struggle with vector tile hosting hosting. With PMTIles vector tile hosting is arguably easier, more convenient and an order of magnitude cheaper then going with Mapbox (especially if you don't need fancy projection / 3d support and are ok with MapLibre). Felt is one of the major services that I believe uses the PMTile approach behind the scenes and they won't be the last. (Notably: they have continued to invest in Tippecanoe which is awesome). With Mapbox focus shifting, it appears, to car navigation - it's great to see disruptive innovation coming from new places. Even more amazing that is has come from a one person team. Also to note, the emergence of PMTiles coincides DuckDB spatial query support will unlock a lot of innovation. The ability to query and process large geoparquet files and quickly stream them into baked PMTiles unlocks a lot of really compelling use cases.
  • bdon 3y ago
    At the bottom of this post is an example of creating PMTiles from GeoParquet via tippecanoe + gpq. Thanks to Tim Schaub for making this possible! gpq convert Cairo_Governorate.parquet --to=geojson | tippecanoe Cairo.geojson -o Cairo.pmtiles * https://cloudnativegeo.org/blog/2023/10/where-is-cog-for-vector/ https://cloudnativegeo.org/blog/2023/10/where-is-cog-for-vec... * https://github.com/planetlabs/gpq https://github.com/planetlabs/gpq
  • NelsonMinar 3y ago
    It's kinda sad how we need open source alternatives to MapBox, the formerly open source company.
    • bdon 3y ago
      Mapbox is still the best choice where a polished suite of mapping APIs is a better fit for a project. Mapbox is a venture-backed company with a SaaS business model, and has never been open source in total - it used to be open core with a FOSS frontend and proprietary backend. This SaaS model is absolutely the best way to fund huge companies and give investors a return. Mapbox has also done the bulk of innovation in open source web mapping over the past 10 years - the Protomaps project uses MapLibre (fork of Mapbox GL 1.0) and the MVT tile format. Both required teams of full-time developers - easily tens of millions in salaries and stock - and they have given away version 1.0 for free as a gift, even though 2.0 is not open source. The ideal software economy is one in which innovators capture a good portion of the wealth they create. This is why it's important for Protomaps to focus on use cases underserved by SaaS, instead of just being a cheaper map API. The sibling comment on wildfire mapping https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37989059 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37989059 is a good example of the applications I want the project to support.
• freyfogle 3y ago
  Brandon, the founder of Protomaps, was interviewed on the Geomob podcast a few months back: https://thegeomob.com/podcast/episode-176 https://thegeomob.com/podcast/episode-176
  • crabmusket 3y ago
    And here on MapScaping: https://mapscaping.com/podcast/planet-scale-tiled-maps-without-a-server/ https://mapscaping.com/podcast/planet-scale-tiled-maps-witho...
• clementmas 3y ago
  I'm currently self-hosting a planet OpenMapTiles mbtiles file with several styles on top of it. I've been meaning to look into Protomaps closer to see if I could use it to reduce costs. It looks like a very promising project!
• wolverine876 3y ago
  Maybe I am overlooking something, but where does Protomaps get its data? Also, is the data open source? The FAQ says the code, etc. is open source, but doesn't mention data: > Is Protomaps open source? / Yes! All core software libraries and formats are open source under permissive licenses, including: ...
  • bdon 3y ago
    It's OpenStreetMap (ODbL) and Natural Earth (public domain) currently * http://openstreetmap.org http://openstreetmap.org * http://naturalearthdata.com http://naturalearthdata.com
    • Aachen 3y ago
      What does naturalearth have that OSM doesn't? I checked the site and it's showing what looks like a subset of OSM
      • bdon 3y ago
        Natural Earth is generalized (low zoom) data and has hand-curated scaleranks on features to determine what features appear at low zooms. None of that is in OSM.
        • Aachen 3y ago
          Ah, thanks!
• andiareso 3y ago
  This is super impressive. Way to go Brandon! Excellent work on PMTiles!
• xxdiamondxx 3y ago
  Maplibre[1] + PMTiles + Felt's "tippecanoe"[2] (it can output .pmtiles) are an awesome combination for self-hosted web maps if you're ok with being locked into a Web Mercator projection for pretty much any geospatial source you can convert to .pmtiles via GDAL[3] and tippecanoe (.shp .gpkg ...) | ogr2ogr -> .geojson | tippecanoe -> .pmtiles for OpenStreetMap data there's planetiler[4], and and openmaptiles[5] styles that work with Maplibre with those combinations you've got a great start to something you can host for pennies on AWS S3+CloudFront or Cloudflare R2, with an open source data pipeline [1] https://maplibre.org/ https://maplibre.org/ [2] https://github.com/felt/tippecanoe https://github.com/felt/tippecanoe [3] https://gdal.org/ https://gdal.org/ [4] https://github.com/onthegomap/planetiler https://github.com/onthegomap/planetiler [5] https://openmaptiles.org/styles/ https://openmaptiles.org/styles/ ps I find GDAL/ogr2ogr documentation pretty hard to parse, as an example to get you started ogr2ogr -f GeoJSON counties.json -t_srs EPSG:4326 -nln counties -sql "SELECT STATEFP, COUNTYFP, NAME FROM tl_2022_us_county" /vsizip/tl_2022_us_county.zip https://www.census.gov/geographies/mapping-files/time-series/geo/cartographic-boundary.html
  • doublemint2203 3y ago
    I'm a student trying to upskill in geospatial/compsci. What kinds of projects could you make with all of this? Any good starting points you'd recommend?
    • tony_cannistra 3y ago
      Not OP, but almost anything where "a map" is the output will be a hugely big learning opportunity for you. Static maps, print-quality maps, interactive web maps -- the experience of building any of those will bring lots of learning. (That's how I got started.)
      • doublemint2203 3y ago
        ty!
    • xxdiamondxx 3y ago
• tobilg 3y ago
  We've had quite some success with deploying "serverless" maps, leveraging PMTiles. Have a look at https://github.com/serverlessmaps/serverlessmaps https://github.com/serverlessmaps/serverlessmaps if you're interested to deploy this on AWS CloudFront/Lambda@Edge/S3...
  • tobilg 3y ago
    I also wrote a blog post as introduction: https://tobilg.com/serverless-maps-for-fun-and-profit https://tobilg.com/serverless-maps-for-fun-and-profit
• simonw 3y ago
  I just used their pmtiles tool to grab a map of just the area around Half Moon Bay, south of San Francisco. I grabbed the latest macOS Go binary from https://github.com/protomaps/go-pmtiles/releases https://github.com/protomaps/go-pmtiles/releases I found a rough bounding box using http://bboxfinder.com/#37.373977,-122.593346,37.570977,-122.400055 http://bboxfinder.com/#37.373977,-122.593346,37.570977,-122.... Then I ran this: pmtiles extract https://build.protomaps.com/20231023.pmtiles hmb.pmtiles \ --bbox=-122.593346,37.373977,-122.400055,37.570977 The result was a 2MB hmb.pmtiles file which, when dragged onto the "drop zone" on https://maps.protomaps.com/ https://maps.protomaps.com/ showed me a detailed zoomable map, with full OpenStreetMap metadata (airport polygons etc) - all the way down to individual building outlines level. All that in 2MB! I'm really impressed. My file is here: https://gist.githubusercontent.com/simonw/3c1a5358ca8f782f1393f7ad0304b4bc/raw/193dae5feb25f6e32fca5bb6420b1ea03abfe13b/hmb.pmtiles https://gist.githubusercontent.com/simonw/3c1a5358ca8f782f13...
  • oritsnile 3y ago
    That's really cool. Cloud be really use full for local businesses. They often embed Google maps, but I feels like having a map from the local are would be sufficient, and cheaper.
    • pimlottc 3y ago
      Wouldn’t they need to keep updating this from time to time to stay current? That would likely kill any savings pretty quickly.
      • tppiotrowski 3y ago
        Protomaps generates daily world files I believe [1] but I haven't confirmed that they're used by the download tool yet. In theory you can download the data everyday to pick up updates. [1] https://maps.protomaps.com/builds/ https://maps.protomaps.com/builds/ Edit: re-reading top comment it looks like they're using a daily file so you'd just have to create a cron job
      • globular-toast 3y ago
• gorbypark 3y ago
  I really wish there was a PMTile implementation for MapLibreGL Native like there is for the JS side (I believe the JS side actually has a way to add arbitrary data protocols). Of course I could stand up some sort of worker or function to sit in the middle, but having this all work client side on Android and iOS would be a game changer for me!
  • Aeolun 3y ago
    Can’t really include 100gb of maps with your app though. How would you use it?
    • fingerlocks 3y ago
      You download it within the app. Or drop it into iCloud and tell the app where to find it. I have 200 gigs of offlined map data my phone with a custom native map app. Not a big deal with terabyte storage on mobile these days.
    • gorbypark 3y ago
      A PMTile is basically a single giant file that can sit on a CDN somewhere, and the client can ask for a certain part of that file using the byte range header. It eliminates having to either have a server that is serving tiles, or paying through the nose for IO if serving static files (uploading literally millions of tiles costs a lot, and not just because of their size). If you want to embed a map file in your app, you can already use MBTiles for that. A MBTile is conceptually like a PMTile, in a way, but it's a zip file full of the tiles with a SQLite database. MapBox/MapLibre already supports local MBTiles. You can serve them online, but of course you need something taking in the x, y z coordinates and serving back the tiles. Most of/the entire value prospect of PMTiles is you can dump a single multi GB files on a CDN somewhere, and clients can just request a little slice of it. No servers or any logic required (besides a CDN that supports byte-range headers). I am hoping that MapLibre native will one day will support sources that are PMTiles. `source: pmtile://my.cdn.com/bigOleFile.pmtile` and then it just works as if pointing at a traditional slippy tile source.
• spandextwins 3y ago
  I'm confused, isn't it just openstreetmaps? I must be missing something.
  • progval 3y ago
    OpenStreetMap is the data they use. Other software usually fetch tiles (images) to display, but here they built a single and much smaller file from OSM data which is rendered directly by clients.
• jkrubin 3y ago
  Worth mentioning this project (https://github.com/onthegomap/planetiler https://github.com/onthegomap/planetiler) that lets you create osm mbtiles and pmtiles pretty easy!
  • zylepe 3y ago
    The protomaps basemap is also built on planetiler: https://github.com/protomaps/basemaps https://github.com/protomaps/basemaps - and Brandon is one of the main contributors a to planetiler!
    • karussell 3y ago
      planetiler is such a sophisticated software. Hats off to Michael! Therefore I'm a bit proud that a tiny part of the fast and memory-efficient import pipeline is using code from GraphHopper :) (see Acknowledgement)
• nazgul17 3y ago
  I am curious about maps and the software to generate them and play with them, but when I tried - a few years ago, admittedly - to dabble in it (I wanted to generate those art-sy nice city maps pictures for my hometown [1]), I was overwhelmed with the ecosystem, all the steps involved, all the options etc. Does anyone have a good introduction to paint a high level picture of this, so someone like me can navigate? [1] https://www.etsy.com/nz/listing/1541532385/dusseldorf-print-print-city-map-art?ref=share_v4_lx https://www.etsy.com/nz/listing/1541532385/dusseldorf-print-...
  • ioshaan 3y ago
    [dead]
• ugh123 3y ago
  Whats the relationship between this and openstreetmaps? Is OSM the "runtime viewer" and Protomaps is the maps and query data?
  • jillesvangurp 3y ago
    Open streetmap is a database that you can use to produce maps from. Open streetmaps the organization does not produce maps as a service directly. They do provide a map editor, which of course also renders the tiles and they host the central database that people contribute to with that editor. But their tiles are not distributed via APIs or dumps otherwise. The only thing that they provide is a database dump in various formats. Mostly people either generate their own tiles from this (using a variety of OSS and proprietary tools available for this) or use companies such as mapbox, maptiler, etc. that do this for them. Typically the commercial options bill using a metered per request model. This can make using maps quite expensive. Ever since Google raised their prices substantially a few years ago, things like Mapbox have become a lot more popular. Mapbox and similar products are also not cheap. What pmtiles does is dramatically lowering the price and complexity for self hosting your own maps to basically the raw CDN network cost plus a small amount of overhead for storage and computation. The tiles are generated using e.g. lambda functions from a single pmtiles file on demand and then cached in the CDN. Any subsequent loads of the same tile are cache hits. So, especially for busy websites and apps, the savings can be substantial.
• bruceh48 3y ago
  These PMTiles don't seem to work well with users behind corporate proxies. The proxy must have to download the entire files before releasing it. Not making a nice user experience. I wonder if there is a way around this?
  • xenator 3y ago
    Switch to POST request? If not, then probably it can be done by additional proxy that will convert range headers to GET params. But TBH corporate proxy in this context doesn't seem to work properly. For example, all other header-based authentication should be broken if proxy doesn't respect additional headers.
• grammers 3y ago
  How is that different from OpenStreetMap? Am I missing something here?
  • kqr 3y ago
    This looks like another way to deliver OpenStreetMap data, which I think is exactly in the spirit of the OSM project.
• jongjong 3y ago
  Wow, that is a huge achievement for an open source project given how much data there is.
• sorenjan 3y ago
  Are there any free (speech or beer) sources of aerial or satellite data that can be used with these free maps?