[mapguide-internals] MapGuide RFC 177 - Mapbox Vector Tile support

[Jackie Ng]

Hi Crispin,

>> So, what does this implementation add to MG?

Assuming you are already aware of what benefits vector tiles would give,
this RFC is primarily to give 
MapGuide the ability to *produce* Mapbox Vector Tiles out of the box.

>> Why would a custom map viewer not simply reference the MVT source?

I'm not quite sure what you mean by MVT source.
 
  * If you mean have some other tool to produce MVT tiles in a XYZ directory
structure for our custom map viewer to consume then yes there are tools to
do that. The definitive list is here:
(https://github.com/mapbox/awesome-vector-tiles) but when you look at what's
listed, most of the tools listed have very low synergy with a MapGuide/FDO
ecosystem. If your spatial data is not some combination of PostGIS/GeoJSON
(of which most of the aforementioned tools are biased towards), you'll have
to set up an intricate pipeline of [data conversion -> MVT production]. This
RFC says skip these middlemen, because we can/should be able to produce
these vector tiles directly from MapGuide.

  * If you mean just use the MVT OGR driver directly instead of re-purposing
the code for use in MapGuide, that would be possible if GDAL/OGR was our
geospatial data abstraction layer. But our abstraction layer is FDO, not
GDAL/OGR. MapGuide does not use GDAL/OGR directly. GDAL/OGR is only used in
MapGuide by virtue of FDO providers being available for it. 

>> Is MapGuide in this RFC simply picking up a "standard" and reformatting
>> it for a custom solution?

Pretty much yes about picking up a "standard". Mapbox Vector Tiles is pretty
much the unofficial standard for vector tiles.

- Jackie



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