[gdal-dev] Vector Tiles in OGR

[Blake Thompson]

Petr,

No one that I know of is currently working on such a tool. It could be a
little difficult to write as well.

Each Tile is its own discrete dataset therefore the hardest part would be
merging of features into the original features across tiles. You could use
some complicated merging technique, but that could be very expensive.

If you wanted to simply view vector tile data it could get confusing as
well since most vector tiles need a buffer when they are used for
visualization programs. This is important for things like labeling on maps
etc. Therefore, you could get a large amount of overlapping data on tiles
if you loaded them all in at once.

I do not say this to discourage someone, but its a non-trivial problem.

As far as writing a simple decoder -- the mapnik-vector-tile decoder isn't
currently able to decode vector tiles into a form not supported by mapnik.
Therefore, OGR would not be able to easily use this. Additionally Mapnik
has a GDAL and OGR plugin, which creates an awesome circular dependency. We
plan to write a generalized encoder and decoder eventually so that any
other library can plugin with out the mapnik requirement. However, we have
yet carved out time to do this properly.

If you have any questions specifically about Mapnik Vector Tile or the
Mapbox Vector Tile Specification feel free to ask me. I would note that you
guys will want to update your vector tiles once the V2 specification
changes are into Mapnik-Vector-Tile.

Thanks,

Blake Thompson
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