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: [email protected] Web: http://www.klokantech.com/
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