Brandon, the founder of Protomaps, was interviewed on the Geomob podcast a few months back: https://thegeomob.com/podcast/episode-176
And here on MapScaping: https://mapscaping.com/podcast/planet-scale-tiled-maps-witho...
Protomaps – A free and open source map of the world
151–160 of 169 posts
Re: Protomaps – A free and open source map of the world
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been testing a setup that automatically generates OpenStreetMap/OpenMapTiles formatted pmtiles and mbtiles, then makes them available by torrent. The torrents get placed in a rss feed at https://planetgen.wifidb.net/ Basically what I did was set up 'qbittorent' client to watch the openstreetmap rss weekly torrent feed. when it downloads a new pbf file, it runs this script I made at https://github.com/acalcutt/Pl…
That's interesting. But it doesn't use BEP-46, right? https://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0046.html (discussion on HN at the time, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12282601 )
I don't think so because it is not updating the same torrent it is making new ones. I am transmitting the torrent over Bittorrent/DHT like they mention, not http, but without it being the same file I'm not sure that is the same.
Re: Protomaps – A free and open source map of the world
#153I really wish there was a PMTile implementation for MapLibreGL Native like there is for the JS side (I believe the JS side actually has a way to add arbitrary data protocols). Of course I could stand up some sort of worker or function to sit in the middle, but having this all work client side on Android and iOS would be a game changer for me!
Can’t really include 100gb of maps with your app though. How would you use it?
A PMTile is basically a single giant file that can sit on a CDN somewhere, and the client can ask for a certain part of that file using the byte range header. It eliminates having to either have a server that is serving tiles, or paying through the nose for IO if serving static files (uploading literally millions of tiles costs a lot, and not just because of their size).
If you want to embed a map file in your app, you can already use MBTiles for that. A MBTile is conceptually like a PMTile, in a way, but it's a zip file full of the tiles with a SQLite database. MapBox/MapLibre already supports local MBTiles. You can serve them online, but of course you need something taking in the x, y z coordinates and serving back the tiles.
Most of/the entire value prospect of PMTiles is you can dump a single multi GB files on a CDN somewhere, and clients can just request a little slice of it. No servers or any logic required (besides a CDN that supports byte-range headers).
I am hoping that MapLibre native will one day will support sources that are PMTiles. `source: pmtile://my.cdn.com/bigOleFile.pmtile` and then it just works as if pointing at a traditional slippy tile source.
Re: Protomaps – A free and open source map of the world
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks! Well, mostly that it's text / XML you usually have to parse in full and boundaries are data heavy, so if you have anything more than a world map, I don't see that working very well. In contrast with the OP or GeoPackage, you can query by tiles/range and only extract the boundaries you need if you're zoomed in somewhere. If you use Tiny Well-Known Binary compression, you can also shrink the data quite a bit wh…
Thank you for that! I love your analysis. Really appreciate you teaching me more about this. :)
You're welcome!
Re: Protomaps – A free and open source map of the world
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure what answer you are looking for / what alternative you are suggesting? OSM is the biggest community effort - NGO, volunteer, corporate, etc - to solve data quality in GIS. The participants do everything to improve quality from individuals walking around with GPS devices to companies launching low earth orbit satellites into space and self-driving cars in the ground with AI error detection. There is a mor…
> I'm not sure what answer you are looking for / what alternative you are suggesting? None of the above. People might just be curious and interested! Thanks for sharing all that. I didn't know much about the quality. Much crowd-sourced data has accuracy problems.
Google maps also isn't always accurate. There's no source of maps that's guaranteed to be 100% accurate all the time.
Re: Protomaps – A free and open source map of the world
#156Worth mentioning this project ( https://github.com/onthegomap/planetiler ) that lets you create osm mbtiles and pmtiles pretty easy!
The protomaps basemap is also built on planetiler: https://github.com/protomaps/basemaps - and Brandon is one of the main contributors a to planetiler!
planetiler is such a sophisticated software. Hats off to Michael!
Therefore I'm a bit proud that a tiny part of the fast and memory-efficient import pipeline is using code from GraphHopper :) (see Acknowledgement)
Re: Protomaps – A free and open source map of the world
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure what answer you are looking for / what alternative you are suggesting? OSM is the biggest community effort - NGO, volunteer, corporate, etc - to solve data quality in GIS. The participants do everything to improve quality from individuals walking around with GPS devices to companies launching low earth orbit satellites into space and self-driving cars in the ground with AI error detection. There is a mor…
> I'm not sure what answer you are looking for / what alternative you are suggesting? None of the above. People might just be curious and interested! Thanks for sharing all that. I didn't know much about the quality. Much crowd-sourced data has accuracy problems.
It is an interesting question. I've worked with a fair bit of geo-data, and found pretty much any sufficiently large geo-dataset, regardless of whether it's crowd-sourced or purchased from a commercial provider tends to have a fair number data accuracy issues.
If you spend any time on either OpenStreetMap or Google Maps in the rural US, and you are very likely to find both missing streets, and streets that have been completely hallucinated out of nothing -- mostly because they were both originally sourced from the US CENSUS TIGER data -- a US govt data set that tends to be full of errors.
OpenStreetMap contributors of often improve these issues over time (though it largely depends on if the area you care about has some sufficiently dedicated mapper).
Re: Protomaps – A free and open source map of the world
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I'm not sure what answer you are looking for / what alternative you are suggesting? None of the above. People might just be curious and interested! Thanks for sharing all that. I didn't know much about the quality. Much crowd-sourced data has accuracy problems.
Google maps also isn't always accurate. There's no source of maps that's guaranteed to be 100% accurate all the time.
> 100% ... all the time
Because nothing meets that standard, it's not an applicable measure of quality. Also, it tends to lead to binary thinking: 100% or null.
But we live in a world of less than 100%, and there is a lot of variation: Five nines, 80%, datasets with just a few valuable records, etc. That's where the real-life questions are.
Re: Protomaps – A free and open source map of the world
#159I am curious about maps and the software to generate them and play with them, but when I tried - a few years ago, admittedly - to dabble in it (I wanted to generate those art-sy nice city maps pictures for my hometown [1]), I was overwhelmed with the ecosystem, all the steps involved, all the options etc. Does anyone have a good introduction to paint a high level picture of this, so someone like me can navigate? [1]…
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Re: Protomaps – A free and open source map of the world
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wouldn’t they need to keep updating this from time to time to stay current? That would likely kill any savings pretty quickly.
It depends what you use it for. I plan to use it for blog posts where I show the track of where I walked. I actually like that the map won't update. It wouldn't make sense to show me walking across a map of the future, would it? It's a record of the past and the map should be frozen just like the writing.
Sure, but in GP's context of local businesses, they certainly will want to keep up-to-date with any changes to make sure customers can still find them.