Brandon, the founder of Protomaps, was interviewed on the Geomob podcast a few months back: https://thegeomob.com/podcast/episode-176
Protomaps – A free and open source map of the world
41–50 of 169 posts
Re: Protomaps – A free and open source map of the world
#42Cool but basemaps are a very tricky thing from a geographers perspective. There are several border conflicts. When it is open source there could be some manipulation. Immediatelly getting downvoted. All I'm saying is that official map boundaries these days should be used. Because I can again not post because too fast here my clarification: I mean official not commercial or proprietary
A commercial data provider can also be showing a manipulated border, and is at least making some kind of editorial decision about what they are showing (whether they think so or not).
For instance:
Why isn't my time zone highlighted on the world map?
> In early 1995, a border war broke out between Peru and Ecuador and the Peruvian government complained to Microsoft that the border was incorrectly placed. Of course, if we complied and moved the border northward, we’d get an equally angry letter from the Ecuadorian government demanding that we move it back. So we removed the feature altogether.
> The time zone map met a similar fate. The Indian government threatened to ban all Microsoft software from the country because we assigned a disputed region to Pakistan in the time zone map. (Any map that depicts an unfavorable border must bear a government stamp warning the end-user that the borders are incorrect. You can’t stamp software.) We had to make a special version of Windows 95 for them.
— https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20030822-00/?p=42...
Re: Protomaps – A free and open source map of the world
#43I've been an avid Mapbox user since getting alpha access to Tilemill. From my perspective, this is the most important contribution to the open mapping space since the introduction of vector tiles and Mapbox GL / Map GL. Mapbox in my opinion left the door open in how they approached tile baking with MTS. While powerful it was way to confusing and expensive. While you could always bake tiles with Tippecanoe you still h…
At the bottom of this post is an example of creating PMTiles from GeoParquet via tippecanoe + gpq. Thanks to Tim Schaub for making this possible!
gpq convert Cairo_Governorate.parquet --to=geojson | tippecanoe Cairo.geojson -o Cairo.pmtiles
* https://cloudnativegeo.org/blog/2023/10/where-is-cog-for-vec...
Re: Protomaps – A free and open source map of the world
#44For 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. > PMTile…
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 b…
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)
Re: Protomaps – A free and open source map of the world
#45Cool but basemaps are a very tricky thing from a geographers perspective. There are several border conflicts. When it is open source there could be some manipulation. Immediatelly getting downvoted. All I'm saying is that official map boundaries these days should be used. Because I can again not post because too fast here my clarification: I mean official not commercial or proprietary
>"There are several border conflicts. When it is open source there could be some manipulation."
Manipulation can and does happen with non open source data. Just ask any politician. You should be thankful to developers who did a great service for free. If something is incorrect because of conflicts - the world will sort it out eventually. It is not developers job.
PS - I did not downvoted as I never downvote any posts.
Re: Protomaps – A free and open source map of the world
#46Usually .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
I'd like to correct that impression - Protomaps is an explicitly commercial venture.
The difference from other commercial vendors is the focus on a complete, easily deployable solution - the hosted API is meant for non-commercial and light commercial use, instead of being the main product offering, to avoid the incentive trap of locking-in paying users to the API.
A related concept is the Community Right to Replicate: https://2i2c.org/right-to-replicate/
Re: Protomaps – A free and open source map of the world
#47> 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 poi…
I haven't found this info in the FAQ, but it would be interesting to know how large that PMTiles file is for a medium-sized country. It seems to be a really attractive way of self-hosting maps that don't have to be 100% up to date and are only used in a specific region. "Recompiling" that file once a year and uploading it to a static file hoster would be an easy process with very little external dependencies. Edit: F…
That's true - I suppose the cost changes depending on the size of the area you're mapping. Maybe a representative set? A city (e.g. Johannesburg), a small country (e.g. UK), and a large country (e.g. USA)?
Re: Protomaps – A free and open source map of the world
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
I haven't found this info in the FAQ, but it would be interesting to know how large that PMTiles file is for a medium-sized country. It seems to be a really attractive way of self-hosting maps that don't have to be 100% up to date and are only used in a specific region. "Recompiling" that file once a year and uploading it to a static file hoster would be an easy process with very little external dependencies. Edit: F…
That's true - I suppose the cost changes depending on the size of the area you're mapping. Maybe a representative set? A city (e.g. Johannesburg), a small country (e.g. UK), and a large country (e.g. USA)?
Monaco is 500k, Ireland +NI is 400M, and Europe is 40G, for their basemap output.
(Representative numbers from my runs)
Re: Protomaps – A free and open source map of the world
#49If anyone else was curious, their sample OSM derived PMTile file (protomaps-basemap-opensource-20230408.pmtiles) is 103GB. https://docs.protomaps.com/basemaps/downloads
It's 107 GB now. It would be great to be able to download only diffs and apply them to a daily, weekly, monthly baseline.
Hmm I was just going off the Firefox estimate, maybe there's some browser difference?
Re: Protomaps – A free and open source map of the world
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's 107 GB now. It would be great to be able to download only diffs and apply them to a daily, weekly, monthly baseline.
Hmm I was just going off the Firefox estimate, maybe there's some browser difference?
The newest major version has moved to a daily build channel (the last major version was last updated in April)
Today 10/23 is 107GB.
https://maps.protomaps.com/builds/
I'll update the documentation page today.