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A new way to make maps with OpenStreetMap

protomaps.com

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Re: A new way to make maps with OpenStreetMap

#61

Post by bdon »

leokennis wrote: post #3
Tomte wrote: post #2

> Existing formats like MBTiles are based on SQLite. This limits the ability to self-host maps to those confident running a server in production. Is that comical, or is there a deeper meaning I don't understand?

I read it as: existing solutions are too hard for simple people with less technical skill.

Author here; a narrower way to express what I meant:

A frontend developer who wants to put a map in their application and wants control over the hosting and data faces some obstacles when using MBtiles:

* Need a virtual machine and disk space

* Need to choose a particular program to read the MBTiles and serve it via HTTP

* Might need reverse proxy and service monitor (systemd or sysv init) to keep it running 24/7

* Need to deal with SSL termination

The popularity of serverless platforms = evidence there's a strong market for delivering software without all of this.

Re: A new way to make maps with OpenStreetMap

#62

Post by canada_dry »

c0nsumer wrote: post #5

This is really interesting to me. I do a lot of mapping of natural surface single track trails (for hiking and mountain biking) along the way be sure to properly name things, add intersection markers, and create relations (routes and superroutes) to document the systems. The biggest downside thus far is a good way of displaying the data. mtb.waymarkedtrails.org gets close, but I'd really like something that displays…

waymarkedtrails.org is a great tool! Glad to see Canadian content in there!

A groomed snowmobile trail addition would also be great!

Re: A new way to make maps with OpenStreetMap

#65

Post by airswimmer »

As it was said

> "In about five minutes, you can select any area in the world and get a self-contained map that runs locally, offline or serverlessly on S3 - check out the Getting Started guide."

5 mins? It took me a night to build the map system using openstreetmap in the original way

Re: A new way to make maps with OpenStreetMap

#66

Post by bdon »

canada_dry wrote: post #64

Got the demo up and running. I've been using leaflet for my map tiling and it just works . The advantage of promomaps being offline is great. So, now... how does one add their own POI's, routes, polygons??

Author here, so there are a few options:

1) If your information belongs in OpenStreetMap, you can add it via an editor like the web editor at https://openstreetmap.org - this will also benefit all other OSM users. You can then "refresh" your Protomaps download to get a new map.

2) If there isn't many point and polygons, it may sense to add them as Leaflet layers, especially if you want them to be interactive

3) Other options are creating vector tiles of your own data and merging or displaying them in the renderer (https://github.com/mapbox/tippecanoe is a great tool to do this from GeoJSON) but I don't have much to support this yet.

Re: A new way to make maps with OpenStreetMap

#67

Post by canada_dry »

bdon wrote: post #66
canada_dry wrote: post #64

Got the demo up and running. I've been using leaflet for my map tiling and it just works . The advantage of promomaps being offline is great. So, now... how does one add their own POI's, routes, polygons??

Author here, so there are a few options: 1) If your information belongs in OpenStreetMap, you can add it via an editor like the web editor at https://openstreetmap.org - this will also benefit all other OSM users. You can then "refresh" your Protomaps download to get a new map. 2) If there isn't many point and polygons, it may sense to add them as Leaflet layers, especially if you want them to be interactive 3) Other…

Thanks for the prompt reply (and for the awesome tool).

I'm getting old LOL... my question re adding POIs, etc. was a brain-fart. As you note, I'll just use leaflet layers!!

Re: A new way to make maps with OpenStreetMap

#68

Post by TheTaytay »

iandanforth wrote: post #50
DoreenMichele wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious what sorts of data you are collecting and how it helps to have it in map form rather than some other file format.

Towns across the country that meet our criteria overlayed with climate change maps. The existing layers around satellite and topo views are also super helpful to get an idea of if the area has good tree cover and interesting landscapes.

When we were city and house shopping, I kept wanted to be able to query houses for things that the major providers don’t provide query terms for. Even proximity to parks was difficult to discern or searching by walkscore, crime rates, etc, was difficult. Each house has that data, and you can search for some of it visually, but as a developer, you just want to run queries...You seem like the sort of person to crack that code when you do choose a city. I’d be curious if you do (or have) come up with anything :)

Re: A new way to make maps with OpenStreetMap

#69

Post by TheTaytay »

bdon wrote: post #40
incanus77 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Originally, MBTiles was designed for mobile offline. Then, Mapbox started serving directly from the SQLite for web & other clients, creating the Node.js SQLite bindings in the process. Eventually, they had an unpacker for MBTiles uploads that would stick the tiles in CDN. So, really no more complex than old school static content hosting. Source: I created MBTiles ;-)

Author of OP here, I use the tile unpacker as well! I didn't point this out in the OP, but I found the ergonomics of uploading tiles to S3 etc get bad once you're over a couple tens of thousands of tiles, as each upload has some overhead. I've tested PMTiles on S3 successfully with hundreds of millions of tiles. Deduplication is also important to save space on redundant ocean/earth tiles; MBTiles can deduplicate via…

When I was playing around with hosting rendered Minecraft slippy maps, I found the upload overhead to S3 to be pretty poor due to the “lots of tiny files” problem. (It renders as hundreds of thousands of rasterized image files for the various zoom levels). You could parallelize it, but it was still poor, and made me want to come up with a way to pack them into fewer files and fetch portions of them at render time so that the upload could be faster. It sounds like that’s what you did for the the PMTiles format?

Re: A new way to make maps with OpenStreetMap

#70

Post by bdon »

TheTaytay wrote: post #69
bdon wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Author of OP here, I use the tile unpacker as well! I didn't point this out in the OP, but I found the ergonomics of uploading tiles to S3 etc get bad once you're over a couple tens of thousands of tiles, as each upload has some overhead. I've tested PMTiles on S3 successfully with hundreds of millions of tiles. Deduplication is also important to save space on redundant ocean/earth tiles; MBTiles can deduplicate via…

When I was playing around with hosting rendered Minecraft slippy maps, I found the upload overhead to S3 to be pretty poor due to the “lots of tiny files” problem. (It renders as hundreds of thousands of rasterized image files for the various zoom levels). You could parallelize it, but it was still poor, and made me want to come up with a way to pack them into fewer files and fetch portions of them at render time so…

That's exactly what PMTiles is for, and there's nothing in it specific to maps or geographic coordinates, just a Z/X/Y pyramid structure. I chose to support Leaflet for now because it is very popular; there's other viewers like OpenSeadragon for which a decoder plugin would be possible.
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