Vector Tiles

And the Future of Web Maps

Tobin Bradley

Mecklenburg County GIS

Problems with Image Tiles

Don't Scale

Immutable

Stupid

Mapbox Vector Tile Spec

• Google Protocol Buffers
• Tile = data based on a square extent within a projection
• Projection agnostic*

Scale!

	Size (MB)
Mecklenburg as Vector	89
Mecklenburg as Raster	12,000
USA as Vector	6,300
USA as Raster

Mutable!

Creating Vector Tiles

Don't: OpenMapTiles

If you must: Tippecanoe

*Mecklenburg parcels and buildings, 758,167 features, to vector tiles: 23MB, 54 seconds

Live Vector Tiles

Tegola

Dirt Simple HTTP API

GeoServer

Serving Vector Tiles

Tileserver-GL

MBTiles-Server

Hosting Services - MapBox, OpenMapTiles, etc.

bored server is bored

Eating Vector Tiles

Mapbox GL JS

OpenLayers

Styling Vector Tiles

Maputnik

*Styling is client dependent.

More Tools

github.com/mapbox/awesome-vector-tiles

What's Coming

What's Coming

What's Coming

• More implementations
• More/improved tile specs
• "real GIS" moving to the browser

I SAID GOOD DAY!

Slides - goo.gl/N4bOCZ

fuzzytolerance.info | @fuzzytolerance | github.com/tobinbradley