Comment by einpoklum
14 days ago
I am not familiar with the ecosystem of geographic data and mapping as online services. Can someone please explain...
* How this tile format, or the organization behind it, related to OpenStreetMap (if it is related at all)?
* Why the need to replace the previous tile format / scheme which they mention?
* What challenges such a project faces (other than, I suppose, being noticed and considered for adoption)?
1) It's not. Maplibre is a JS library for displaying map data. OpenStreetMap is a collection of map data that is published in various formats. Different levels of the stack.
2) It's an optimization/advancement. There are some pain points in the older version that 10 years of experience can fix in a newer format.
3) Attention, funding. Technically, they're at the leading edge of open source.
Additionally to point 2, the older format was created by a company (Mapbox) that used to be open source-friendly but has recently made a larger pushback against open source and open standards, changing the licenses of much of their formerly open source work. (The Maplibre JS library itself is a fork of that company's previous open source work from its last open source drop to keep the work open source.)
> There are some pain points in the older version that 10 years of experience can fix in a newer format.
What were the major pain points? Compression ratio and speed seem like two of them. (Thanks for answering the elementary questions.)
Lack of tessellation was a big one. In many cases you'd rather have the polygons pre-tessellated in the file format. Now you can. Or you can avoid doing that and save the bytes.
The format is also designed to slide onto the GPU more easily. If you're writing a vector map from scratch, I say just do MLT.
There was never any support for more complex geometry. Now someone could add curves.
Attributes had to be fairly simple. Now you could conceivably do hierarchical attributes.
The requirements for navigation data tiles get specific and weird (from a visual perspective). Now it can be added without breaking existing data.
Thanks, @wirefool :-)
> OpenStreetMap is a collection of map data that is published in various formats.
So, OpenStreetMap.org is just one site which uses the "real" OpenStreetMap, which is the data?
The data can be downloaded here: https://planet.osm.org/ Here's a list of OSM data users: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/List_of_OSM-based_servic...
The key info token you'll want to know as someone foreign to map topics is that maplibre is a licence continuity fork of the formerly open source Mapbox code.
Everything else pretty much derives from this, e.g. yeah, OSM did not suddenly go all in on former mapbox stuff only because the company started keeping updates behind a paywall, OSM continues to be as tool-agnostic as ever.