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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 r

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
kylebarron 3y ago
pmtiles are only the counterpart to the "overviews" part of COG. pmtiles doesn't give you analysis-ready data. For that, look to FlatGeobuf or GeoParquet (once it gets a spatial index in v1.1 of the spec)
- wiredfool 3y ago
  Yeah, I'm aware of that. I love what you're going with geoparquet, it's certainly quite nice for analysis and some viewing. But there are still going to be a lot of datasets and clients that aren't going to be able to handle that where the tiled approach will work. I'm looking at this currently for a couple of clients, and I think that for what we're doing -- we're going to wind up serving both a view and analysis version separately.

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

kylebarron 3y ago

pmtiles are only the counterpart to the "overviews" part of COG. pmtiles doesn't give you analysis-ready data. For that, look to FlatGeobuf or GeoParquet (once it gets a spatial index in v1.1 of the spec)

wiredfool 3y ago
Yeah, I'm aware of that. I love what you're going with geoparquet, it's certainly quite nice for analysis and some viewing. But there are still going to be a lot of datasets and clients that aren't going to be able to handle that where the tiled approach will work. I'm looking at this currently for a couple of clients, and I think that for what we're doing -- we're going to wind up serving both a view and analysis version separately.