[Osmf-talk] Tiles

Sat Jun 3 16:32:19 UTC 2023

Yes. As a (relative) newcomer to OSM, something strikes me in all the debates that involve openstreetmap.org: what I perceive as the postulate that this website is aimed at contributors, and only them. It may even be construed as a filter to select the kind of contributors the community is interested in, and only them. I see very little concern about what message the community hopes to convey to the world other than « please contribute ». Do we really have nothing to say to e.g. the press and end users? It looks like the entrance of a private club.

As I see it, OpenStreetMap is a tremendously successful project but it does not behave as such. To examplify the concrete consequences, it does not help me when I call a tourist office to ask them to contribute their updates of hiking routes: I spend more time debunking misconceptions about OSM than discussing collaboration.

Maybe the foundation should fork a few euros or dollars to a marketing or UX firm for a real web portal, and move the bare contributor’s page to another URL?

Cheers,

St.

> Le 3 juin 2023 à 00:48, m at rtijn.org a écrit :
> 
> This is a great response, Brian, and I admire your work on OSM Americana greatly.
> 
> I agree with Steve; OSMF should not be in the business of serving tiles (raster or vector, that's immaterial) except to support the volunteer mapping community as needed.
> 
> Another interesting (and related) question for OSMF to ponder—and I am surely not the first person to ask it—is whether the OSM website should have a map front and center in the first place. I like to point to the OSM France, Belgium, Germany websites that do a much better job explaining what OSM is about (community) than osm.org does.
> 
> Martijn
> 
>> On Jun 1, 2023, at 9:04 PM, Brian M. Sperlongano <zelonewolf at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> On Thu, Jun 1, 2023 at 10:09 PM Mikel Maron <mikel.maron at gmail.com <mailto:mikel.maron at gmail.com>> wrote:
>>> The upside to vector tiles is flexibility in rendering for various mapper use cases, aiding data creation. One idea I heard recently was to show a map where older features fade from the map. Pretty cool idea. Of course ultimately  depends on what tags and metadata are included within the tiles (you can do everything) but something like last edit time seems sensible property potentially.
>> 
>> I'm a big proponent of vector tiles.  After all, I helped kick-start a vector-tile-based community map style[1].
>> 
>> I've also observed that the idea that the OSMF needs to bankroll vector tile technology to jump-start style development hasn't aged well. When the idea was first proposed, rendering vector tiles took a long time and serious hardware. We needed the OSMF to host vector tiles because it was unreasonable for a casual developer to pay for a high-end server to do the rendering or rent a cloud server to do it.  However, technology has changed, and it was because individual software developers solved problems they had and not because the Foundation kick-started anything.  It's now possible to render a planet vector tile server for $1-2 of cloud compute time and about $10 a month to store and host it online.  This is how I host a vector tile server[2] for my map style for the cost of a couple of cups of coffee a month.  Of course, if it gets too popular, bandwidth costs money, and I'd be forced to cut it off.  However, these same economic considerations apply to anyone wanting to dabble in vector-tile-style development and they'd be able to spin up their own.
>> 
>> Another observation about vector tiles is that if the tile schema is not tailored to the style, you waste A LOT of bandwidth serving up tile data that isn't displayed to the users.  Sometimes that's okay, such as serving tiles with multiple languages so the user can switch the display in their browser. But if the tiles have certain data at zoom X, but the style doesn't begin displaying that data until zoom Y, or not at all, that's a waste of bandwidth, not to mention unnecessary slower load times in the client. So, the idea of a centrally-hosted "general purpose" tile set becomes questionable for non-trivial styles. 
>> 
>> I acknowledge that there are technology gaps to address.  For example, minutely vector-tile updates are not there yet (full planet renders in about 30 minutes have been demonstrated), and I understand that there are folks working on it. If the Foundation focused on closing technology gaps like that, I'd be more interested, though I'm not sure that would be the best use of limited funds.
>> 
>> In summary, technological advancements have made vector tile rendering and hosting more affordable for individual developers, reducing the need for the OSMF to support style development financially. While there are still technical challenges, it is debatable whether it is the OSMF's responsibility to address them, given the many other competing priorities.
>> 
>> [1] https://zelonewolf.github.io/openstreetmap-americana
>> [2] https://6ug7hetxl9.execute-api.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/
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