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I'm excited for this! I have noticed that most apps that use OSM data provide offline vector downloads for each region. Are most of these apps building their

I'm excited for this! I have noticed that most apps that use OSM data provide offline vector downloads for each region. Are most of these apps building their own vector databases? I assume that OSM themselves providing vector tiles will be game changing, allowing app developers to skip creating their own vector downloads as they could just hook into the live vector tiles. No doubt this will make providing OSM maps a much simpler process.

cldellow 3y ago
You often want to build your own tiles for specialized applications. Any map schema is a tradeoff -- if you include every feature in every tile at every zoom level so that the renderer can pick and choose what to show, you bloat the tile file size. The blog post is very light on details. My intuition is that this is primarily focused on powering the map on osm.org in service of people who edit OSM getting to see faster updates. This would be in keeping with their current raster tiles, which are not meant for use in "real" applications. There are enough technical challenges in rolling out vector tiles with minutely updates for editors on OSM -- in my opinion, they should solve it for OSM first before thinking about committing to a specific schema for public use by other apps. Still, anything that incentivizes innovation on vector tiles is pretty exciting. One option that could be interesting: provide "fat" builds of tiles that have every feature, and create tooling to do something akin to treeshaking so people can simplify the resulting tiles to only contain the features they need for their use case.
orblivion 3y ago
I recently made a self-hostable web app* that works the same way; the user downloads regions with a point and click, I have the data on S3. I used Protomaps, which is vector library for the browser. I did look into seeing if I could just download the maps straight from Protomaps. I didn't end up doing so, I think it's because they didn't seem to have an API that I felt like I could scrape wholesale. But also, it turns out that there's a question of how that data is generated. There's a certain schema of what sorts of things show up in the browser, perhaps with styles giving options for how to display them. But which raw OSM data you decide to include, and which visual element it corresponds to, is up to the producer of that data. So thinking of Organic Maps and OsmAnd, I bet they choose slighly different things and probably change it over time. * https://sandstorm.org/news/2023-12-05-osm-on-sandstorm https://sandstorm.org/news/2023-12-05-osm-on-sandstorm
stereo 3y ago
Post author here! Yes, most apps have to create their own tile or download server at the moment. We’re hoping that our tiles will be useful to the greater ecosystem, in the same way that our current raster tiles get used everywhere. The nice people at https://download.geofabrik.de https://download.geofabrik.de provide daily country-level OpenStreetMap extracts in the Shortbread schema, which is the same schema that we are going to use for our live tiles.
- orblivion 3y ago
  Wait I thought these downloads are raw data (osm.pbf). Where are the shortbread downloads? Is that what the shp files are?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - stereo 3y ago
    If you look at, say, https://download.geofabrik.de/europe/luxembourg.html https://download.geofabrik.de/europe/luxembourg.html you'll see a link for "experimental vector tile package conforming to Shortbread schema for use with MapLibre and other MVT capable software".
    - blargpls 3y ago
      Seems like they are not available for all regions or countries. E.g. the pages for Europe, Germany and UK don't have such a link. I guess this is related to data and file size.

cldellow 3y ago

You often want to build your own tiles for specialized applications. Any map schema is a tradeoff -- if you include every feature in every tile at every zoom level so that the renderer can pick and choose what to show, you bloat the tile file size. The blog post is very light on details. My intuition is that this is primarily focused on powering the map on osm.org in service of people who edit OSM getting to see faster updates. This would be in keeping with their current raster tiles, which are not meant for use in "real" applications. There are enough technical challenges in rolling out vector tiles with minutely updates for editors on OSM -- in my opinion, they should solve it for OSM first before thinking about committing to a specific schema for public use by other apps. Still, anything that incentivizes innovation on vector tiles is pretty exciting. One option that could be interesting: provide "fat" builds of tiles that have every feature, and create tooling to do something akin to treeshaking so people can simplify the resulting tiles to only contain the features they need for their use case.

orblivion 3y ago

I recently made a self-hostable web app* that works the same way; the user downloads regions with a point and click, I have the data on S3. I used Protomaps, which is vector library for the browser. I did look into seeing if I could just download the maps straight from Protomaps. I didn't end up doing so, I think it's because they didn't seem to have an API that I felt like I could scrape wholesale. But also, it turns out that there's a question of how that data is generated. There's a certain schema of what sorts of things show up in the browser, perhaps with styles giving options for how to display them. But which raw OSM data you decide to include, and which visual element it corresponds to, is up to the producer of that data. So thinking of Organic Maps and OsmAnd, I bet they choose slighly different things and probably change it over time. * https://sandstorm.org/news/2023-12-05-osm-on-sandstorm https://sandstorm.org/news/2023-12-05-osm-on-sandstorm

stereo 3y ago

Post author here! Yes, most apps have to create their own tile or download server at the moment. We’re hoping that our tiles will be useful to the greater ecosystem, in the same way that our current raster tiles get used everywhere. The nice people at https://download.geofabrik.de https://download.geofabrik.de provide daily country-level OpenStreetMap extracts in the Shortbread schema, which is the same schema that we are going to use for our live tiles.

orblivion 3y ago
Wait I thought these downloads are raw data (osm.pbf). Where are the shortbread downloads? Is that what the shp files are?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- stereo 3y ago
  If you look at, say, https://download.geofabrik.de/europe/luxembourg.html https://download.geofabrik.de/europe/luxembourg.html you'll see a link for "experimental vector tile package conforming to Shortbread schema for use with MapLibre and other MVT capable software".
  - blargpls 3y ago
    Seems like they are not available for all regions or countries. E.g. the pages for Europe, Germany and UK don't have such a link. I guess this is related to data and file size.