[OSM-dev] Vector tiles format

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

On 05/28/2012 09:31 AM, Ander Pijoan wrote:
> As part of my GSoC I am going to improve OSM data rendering in KDE's
> Marble and one of the tasks is to prepare Marble for vector tilling. I
> see there's one student working on a vector tile server and that there
> are some tests already developed (http://osmosnimki.ru/vtile/) using
> GeoJSON.

There was also an announcement by a guy named Sandor Seres who seems to 
be involved with an outfit called fasterimagining.com about vector 
tiling on this list recently but it is completely unclear what, if any, 
portion of their software is Open Source or whether that was just 
advertising.

In addition, Development Seed have recently sought funding for an 
OSM-related project that includes improving access to OSM data which I 
believe means some sort of vector tiling as well but I'm unsure if they 
have progressed beyond the "we'd like to work on that if someone gives 
us money" stage - Tom MAcWright might be able to say more. If they do 
develop something then it is likely to have more manpower behind it than 
the average OSM volunteer coding project, which doesn't mean it's better 
but it's likely to be.

There's also a vector tile backend related to Komzpa's "Kothic" renderer 
(see http://code.google.com/p/kothic/), I'm not sure if that is the same 
as the osmosnimki.ru effort.

> My question is if this format is going to be definetly or these are only
> tests.

I'm not involved with any of these but I can say for sure that it is far 
from clear whether OSM itself will ever offer vector tiles and if they 
do, what format or style these tiles would be in. The one thing that is 
definite here is that nothing is definite.

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"