[gdal-dev] Vector Tiles in OGR

[Petr Pridal]

Hi,

Is anybody working on an OGR driver for mapbox-like vector tiles (PBF
blobs) stored in MBTiles or downloaded from a url via curl?

If this is done, all the GDAL-powered tools could access the vector
features available in vector tiles directly - it means vector data in QGIS
and Grass for any region in world without any extra effort. This would be
damn cool!

It seems to be doable with an open-source code like:
https://github.com/mapbox/mapnik-vector-tile/blob/master/examples/c%2B%2B/tileinfo.cpp

Recently we have rendered the whole world from OpenStreetMap planet into
vector tiles - and made these tiles downloadable for free (the whole world
or country and city extracts).

Downloads are hosted on Swiss academical network and the project is
cooperation between Klokan Technologies GmbH and students from HSR
university in Switzerland.

Everything is done with open-source software, properly documented and
forkable on github.

See: http://osm2vectortiles.org/ and
https://github.com/osm2vectortiles/osm2vectortiles

It practically means you can make your own OSM server running on your own
hardware - usable even offline on your laptop or without firewalls within a
few minutes.

No PostGIS needed and no processing of planet dump on a computer with 20GB+
RAM.
Any standard low-end computer or virtual machine can be used...

This including having your own raster tile server - where raster tiles are
rendered on demand from vector tiles by Mapnik (we used tessera tilelive
based server and docker - so the whole server can be up in a linux
container with one command, if you don't want to install the software
natively).

If you have WebGL in your browser then raw vector tiles are directly at:
http://osm2vectortiles.tileserver.com/ with a style applied for example at:
http://osm2vectortiles.org/maps/

Setup is quite easy: download vector tiles packed in MBTiles format
(extracts has a few megabytes, countries gigabytes, whole world is about 60
GB) and use it.
Typical use would be a start of a basic raster tileserver or serving the
vector tiles directly from any hosting (even a cheap PHP hosting can do
this).

Everything is documented at: http://osm2vectortiles.org/docs/ and for free.
Patches and pull requests on the vector tiles rendering process and schema
are welcome ;-)

If there would be OGR driver for vector tiles it would make a similar
resource extremely useful also for other purposes in GIS tools - not only
for tileservers and direct visualisation.

Any feedback or ideas are really welcome...

Petr
-- 
Petr Pridal, Ph.D.
CEO

Klokan Technologies GmbH
Hofnerstrasse 98, 6314 Unterageri, Switzerland
Tel: +41 (0)41 511 26 12
Email: info at klokantech.com
Web: http://www.klokantech.com/
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