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Protomaps – A free and open source map of the world

protomaps.com

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Re: Protomaps – A free and open source map of the world

#2

Post by keepamovin »

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.

Re: Protomaps – A free and open source map of the world

#5

Post by geokon »

INTPenis wrote: post #3

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.

https://protomaps.com/faq

They seem to be explicitly noncommercial

Re: Protomaps – A free and open source map of the world

#6

Post by bcks »

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-repl...

Re: Protomaps – A free and open source map of the world

#7

Post by AlbertoGP »

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/

Re: Protomaps – A free and open source map of the world

#8

Post by robertlagrant »

> 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.

Re: Protomaps – A free and open source map of the world

#9

Post by jack_riminton »

keepamovin wrote: post #2

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.

But protomaps is still getting the map data from a CDN, do you mean that the map data would be cached on the device?
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