[HN Gopher] Overture Maps Foundation releases open map dataset
___________________________________________________________________
Overture Maps Foundation releases open map dataset
Author : chippy
Score : 292 points
Date : 2023-07-26 15:34 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (overturemaps.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (overturemaps.org)
| mikeyouse wrote:
| The GitHub repo is here; https://github.com/OvertureMaps/data --
| Licenses look super permissive - I'm not that familiar with the
| state of Open Mapping but the GERS idea looks great too.
|
| https://docs.overturemaps.org/gers/
| orra wrote:
| The CDLA license feels like NIH... but at least it looks
| genuinely permissive, as opposed to fake open source.
|
| Curiously, two of the four layers use the ODbL.
| matkoniecz wrote:
| > Curiously, two of the four layers use the ODbL.
|
| Probably this data is reformatted OpenStreetMap data or
| derived from it (so is licensed as ODBL and requires
| attributing OpenStreetMap)
| divbzero wrote:
| Between this, Natural Earth, OpenStreetMap, USGS, and others, the
| availability of map data today would be stunning to early
| cartographers.
| sdfghswe wrote:
| What's the difference between this and Open Street Maps?
| Doctor_Fegg wrote:
| OSM is predominantly human-made. This is predominantly machine-
| made.
| hk__2 wrote:
| Machine-made ...from OSM and other sources.
| matkoniecz wrote:
| OpenStreetMap is community of people creating fully open map
| database. From roads, shops and rivers to tourism attractions,
| hiking routes and hospitals, with all kind of detail. Anyone
| can contribute (and as someone quite involved in OSM: if you
| want to map something, especially area near you: you are
| welcome!).
|
| Overture is a new group of companies releasing some datasets on
| open licenses, but methods used to create them remain
| proprietary. Some of released data is theirs, many datasets are
| repackaged OpenStreetMap data.
| pininja wrote:
| To start, the admin boundaries and POIs are given a more
| permissive license. They're mission is to make permissive map
| datasets.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| Ha I was just wondering the same and Overture has a FAQ that
| answers that exact question;
|
| _Overture is a data-centric map project, not a community of
| individual map editors. Therefore, Overture is intended to be
| complementary to OSM. We combine OSM with other sources to
| produce new open map data sets. Overture data will be available
| for use by the OpenStreetMap community under compatible open
| data licenses. Overture members are encouraged to contribute to
| OSM directly._
| zigzag312 wrote:
| _We 've focused on designing a data schema that is easy for
| developers to quickly understand and use in building map
| products._
|
| https://docs.overturemaps.org/
|
| OSM focuses on open map editing, but due to it's flexible
| schema, it can be hard to extract needed information from
| OSM.
|
| Overture seems to focus on providing map data (from multiple
| sources) that can be used more easily.
|
| EDIT: OSM is also trying to improve the OSM data model for
| easier processing. https://github.com/osmlab/osm-data-model
| leokennis wrote:
| In some ways OSM is more impressive than Wikipedia.
|
| There's a gravel path near my house that maybe sees 20 people
| using it daily. Due to some work done nearby, the path was
| partially moved a few meters to the side. OSM reflected this
| new reality the day after.
| hk__2 wrote:
| This really depends on the density of contributors. In Paris
| every single tree is mapped on OSM, while in more remote
| areas it's not rare to see entire roads or even villages
| missing.
| Someone wrote:
| > This really depends on the density of contributors. In
| Paris every single tree is mapped on OSM
|
| Could also be that OSM leverages an open data set.
|
| If my French doesn't deceive me,
| https://opendata.paris.fr/explore/dataset/les-
| arbres/informa... has data on 207,688 trees, tagged with
| species, height, and circumference.
| crtified wrote:
| Overture is many existing corporate interests banding together
| in an effort to become "the" dominant, centralised geo-database
| of the planet Earth going forward.
|
| It offers a laudable goal but with a definite business
| underpinning.
| dfgssdfgsdfg wrote:
| Is there any quicksand on the map? What about Lil Terry, is he on
| the map?
| mike_d wrote:
| > Administrative Boundaries: A global open dataset of national
| and regional administrative boundaries, this boundary data
| includes regional names which have been translated into over 40
| different languages to support international use.
|
| Oh that is going to be fun. If I recall correctly Google Maps
| alters the boundaries of places based on the views of the
| location the map is being requested from to avoid getting in the
| middle of disputes.
|
| Not "correctly" showing boundaries is a crime in many countries.
|
| Edit: here is a source https://qz.com/224821/see-how-borders-
| change-on-google-maps-...
| pininja wrote:
| POIs, buildings, transportation network, and admin boundaries
| layers.. on my!
| dhx wrote:
| I have an interest in this topic as a contributor to
| AllThePlaces[1], an open source project collating Scrapy spiders
| (MIT license) that crawl websites of franchises/retail chains
| that you'd find listed in name-suggestion-index[2] to retrieve
| location data (CC-0 license). The project is just short of
| collecting 3 million points of interest from almost 1700 spiders.
|
| Overture Maps appears to be quite a closed and proprietary
| project, with claims of openness limited to being able to
| download a data set and accompanying schema specification. Some
| issues that immediately come to mind:
|
| 1. There is no published description for how the data was
| generated. End users thus are given no assurance of how accurate
| and complete the data is.
|
| a. As an example, administrative boundaries are frightfully
| complex and include disputed boundaries, significant ambiguity in
| definition of boundaries, and trade-off between precision of
| boundaries versus performance of algorithms using administrative
| boundary data. Which definition of a boundary does Overture Maps
| adhere to, or can it support multiple definitions?
|
| b. It's probable that Microsoft have contributed
| ld+json/microdata geographic data from BingBot crawls of the
| Internet. This data is notoriously incorrect, including fields
| mixed up and invalidly repurposed, "CLOSED" in field names to
| denote closure of a place 5 years ago but the web page remains
| online, and much ambiguity in opening hours specifications. For
| AllThePlaces, many of the spiders developed require human
| consideration, sometimes of considerable complexity, to piece
| together horribly messy data that is published by shop and
| restaurant franchises, and other organisations providing location
| data via their websites.
|
| c. For location information where +/- 1-5m accuracy and precision
| may be required (e.g. individual shops within a shopping
| centre[3]), source data is typically provided by the
| authoritative sources with 1mm precision and +/- 10-100m
| accuracy. AllThePlaces, Overture Maps, Google Maps and similar
| still need human editors (OpenStreetMap editors) to do on-the-
| ground surveys to pinpoint precise locations and to standardise
| the definition of a location (e.g. for a point, should it be the
| centroid of the largest regular polygon which could be placed in
| the overall irregular polygon, the center of mass of a planar
| lamina, the location of the main entrance, or some other
| definition?).
|
| d. If Overture Maps is dependent on BingBot for place data,
| they'll miss an enormous number of points of interest that
| BingBot would never be able to find. For example, an undocumented
| REST/JSON/GraphQL API call or modification to parameters to an
| observed store locator API call may be necessary to return all
| locations and relevant fields of data. Website developers
| routinely do stupid things with robots.txt such as instruct a bot
| to crawl 10k pages (1GB+) from a sitemap last updated 5 years ago
| rather than make 10 fast API calls for up-to-date data (5MB).
| Overture Maps would be free to consume data from AllThePlaces as
| it is CC-0 licensed, and possibly correlate it with other data
| sources such as BingBot crawl data, a government database of
| licensed commercial premises or postal address geocoding data.
| However the messiness of data in various sources would be
| approaching impossible to reconcile, even for humans, and
| Overture Maps would possibly have to decide whether to err on the
| side of having duplicates, or lack completeness.
|
| 2. There is no published tooling for how someone else can
| reproduce the same data.
|
| a. AllThePlaces users fairly frequently experience the wrath of
| Cloudflare, Imperva and other Internet-breaking third parties, as
| well as custom geographic blocking schemes and more rarely,
| overzealous rate limiting mechanisms. If Overture Maps is
| dependent on BingBot crawls, they'll have a slight advantage over
| AllThePlaces due to deliberate whitelisting of BingBot from the
| likes of Cloudflare, Imperva, customer firewalls, etc. However,
| no matter whether you're AllThePlaces or Overture Maps or anyone
| else, if you want to capture as many points of interest as
| possible across the world, use of residential ISP subnets and
| anti-bot-detection software is increasingly required. They'll
| need people in dozens of countries each crawling websites
| targeted to the same country, using residential ISP address
| space. Otherwise they end up with an American view of the world,
| or a European view of the world, or something else that isn't the
| full picture.
|
| b. If Overture Maps has locations incorrect for a franchise/brand
| due to a data cleansing problem or sourcing data from a bad
| source (perhaps non-authoritative), there are no software
| repositories for the franchise/brand to raise an issue or submit
| a patch against.
|
| [1] https://www.alltheplaces.xyz/
|
| [2] http://nsi.guide/
|
| [3] Example Australian shopping centre as captured by
| AllThePlaces:
| https://www.alltheplaces.xyz/map/#18.07/-33.834646/150.98952...
| tony_cannistra wrote:
| > _2. There is no published tooling for how someone else can
| reproduce the same data._
|
| This is true, and is actually the _whole point_ of Overture.
|
| Overture was developed to enable private companies to leverage
| open data (like OpenStreetMap) but also combine it with their
| proprietary data and processes.
|
| The intention is to share the _result_ with a relatively
| permissive license (a new thing called the Community Database
| License Agreement) but keep the _process_ and _underlying data_
| proprietary.
| uneekname wrote:
| Yes, exactly. Overture is, for better or worse, looking to
| create a dataset that is _more difficult_ to mess with /
| contribute to.
|
| I'm big on OpenStreetMap, but I can't deny its a bit of a
| liability for Facebook and other companies that display maps
| to their users. There is the occasional vandalism edit that
| simply can't be shown to an end-user. Facebook put
| significant effort into maintaining a moderated version of
| the OSM database that lags behind the real-time edits.
| Facebook, Microsoft, TomTom, etc. know this is a ton of work
| and want to pool their resources. Making it open also helps
| to openly compete with Google, the other big map data
| provider.
|
| If you want to contribute to Overture as an end-user, AFAICT
| your best option is to edit OpenStreetMap and see if your
| changes eventually get pulled in. Overture has promised the
| OSM community that they'll make much of their data available
| to be contributed back, we'll see if that pans out.
|
| When it comes to AllThePlaces -- as an OSM nerd it seems like
| there is an opportunity to build a better bridge between this
| and OpenStreetMap, to make it easier to quickly update
| businesses in an area. Recently there has been a pretty
| successful push to link OSM data with WikiData, using tools
| like the OSM - Wikidata matcher [0]. For POIs, it's a lot of
| work to add a bunch of local businesses, even with tools like
| EveryDoor [1]. It would be so cool to see AllThePlaces
| integration into RapID for example, if there isn't already(?)
|
| [0] https://osm.wikidata.link/
|
| [1] https://every-door.app/
| teddyh wrote:
| > _There is the occasional vandalism edit that simply can
| 't be shown to an end-user._
|
| I remember the same sort of arguments being made about how
| web sites could not possibly ever accept user comments or
| submissions, or could not ever risk having users sending
| links to one another. Those all proved to be false.
| pojzon wrote:
| > not possibly ever accept user comments or submissions,
| or could not ever risk having users sending links to one
| another. Those all proved to be false
|
| Funny thing is that this part is most often the cause of
| a data breach when looking at majority of pentesting
| reports.
|
| One thing is to expose something to few ppl you know and
| another thing is a possibility to send things to millions
| of ppl that are constantly abused like Twitter or
| Youtube.
| uneekname wrote:
| Editing OpenStreetMap isn't quite equivalent to
| commenting on a post. OSM allows you to edit _anything,_
| which is fantastic but also allows for more serious
| vandalism. We have seen major cities renamed to racial
| slurs, for example. As with Wikipedia, the community is
| generally very good about correcting these issues
| quickly. It 's an uncommon problem that a lot of people
| work to mitigate. But I stand by what I said: vandalism
| on OSM is in many cases unacceptable to show to end-
| users.
|
| The OSM basemap is used in many official publications, in
| many social media applications, etc. I'd actually
| recommend using the basemap for most simple mapping
| cases, as long as it's being continuously updated from
| upstream (or, it _is the upstream basemap_ ). If you take
| a snapshot of that data, however, you risk capturing some
| bad stuff. That is a real risk for a company like Meta.
| Doctor_Fegg wrote:
| > We have seen major cities renamed to racial slurs, for
| example.
|
| Once in 19 years, I think?
|
| It's not great but let's not pretend it's more of a
| problem than it is.
| sneak wrote:
| There are many links to legal content that Instagram and
| FB messenger will not allow you to send to your friends,
| so I'm not sure how vindicated you are.
| teddyh wrote:
| That's more of an indictment of Meta than an argument
| against uncensored user-to-user communication.
| OfSanguineFire wrote:
| > I remember the same sort of arguments being made about
| how web sites could not possibly ever accept user
| comments or submissions
|
| The heyday of comments sections on news websites is now
| in the past. Not long ago, Lonely Planet took down its
| renowned Thorn Tree forums, which had been a big part of
| the travel internet since the 1990s. Friends who run a
| major website for a particular hobby told me that they
| canceled their plans to launch a forum, since their site
| is advertising-supported and a forum could damage their
| relationships with advertisers.
|
| Reliable moderation costs money, and if you don't
| moderate heavily enough, you're going to get user
| comments that tarnish your brand (or at least scare execs
| into thinking that the brand will be tarnished).
| justapassenger wrote:
| Comments are not core parts of content.
|
| What this is taking about is closer to Wikipedia. And
| vandalism is a real thing there, so portion of topics is
| moderated.
| matkoniecz wrote:
| > It would be so cool to see AllThePlaces integration into
| RapID for example, if there isn't already(?)
|
| Part of the problem is not entirely clear
| copyright/copyright-like status of this dataset. Thanks to
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_right and similar
| things (in general OSM is really careful with legal status
| of datasets being imported).
| uneekname wrote:
| Ah, great catch. After posting my comment I came across
| this GitHub issue that touches on this point as well [0]
|
| As always, I will be vigilant about checking licenses
| before adding data to OSM!
|
| [0]
| https://github.com/alltheplaces/alltheplaces/issues/5133
| matkoniecz wrote:
| Sadly copyright and copyright-like restrictions are
| really complex. I am not 100% entirely sure whether
| concerns that I raised in this issue are really
| problematic, but...
| dhx wrote:
| Wouldn't the closed processes and underlying data severely
| limit communities such as OSM from using Overture Maps
| results for anything other than a validation of what OSM
| already knows from other sources?
|
| Perhaps Overture Maps has used impressively accurate
| satellite imagery tracing to detect the demolition and
| rebuild of a structure somewhere in Sudan, and can output a
| new polygon. No OSM mapper is setting foot in Sudan, and
| recent satellite imagery for the area is not available
| through companies that share such data for OSM use.
|
| The issue for an OSM mapper who sees the conflict between OSM
| (with the old building) and Overture Maps (with the new
| building) is they don't have any information to know which
| result is accurate. Is OSM just out of date? Has Overture
| Maps produced the result from outdated satellite imagery and
| OSM is more up-to-date? Is the result form Overture Maps the
| result of a mistake in an automated tracing algorithm?
| tony_cannistra wrote:
| These are all valid questions, and commonly raised
| concerns, about the Overture Project.
| justinclift wrote:
| > Wouldn't the closed processes and underlying data
| severely limit communities such as OSM from using Overture
| Maps results for anything other than a validation of what
| OSM already knows from other sources?
|
| Seems like a play at the old Microsoft "Embrace, Extend"
| approach. Whether or not there's an Extinguish after that
| is yet to be determined.
| justinclift wrote:
| Sounds like that's going to be a problem for
| proving/reproducing results independently then. :(
| stderrout wrote:
| Wonder what could be reasoning behind this. Is it they dont
| want disclose data collection practices or cant do from legal
| points.
|
| Things like it could come from alexa, pc or any devices
| devices with forced opt ins that keep scanning all your
| neighbours wifi networks and mac addresses.
|
| Believe there was also an initiative where amazon devices
| will provide adhoc internet connectivity by piggy backing on
| other amazon devices on different networks with connectivity.
|
| So all the openness but without any controls. There should
| already be a better term for things like this.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| strong agree -- additionally, there is clear public relations
| going on, announcing maps like this as "trusted" or "official"
| backing, presumably for decisions over commerce, safety,
| insurance claims or other non-security but valuable, data-
| oriented activity. The public or public oversight, has what
| recourse here?
| tony_cannistra wrote:
| For context, Overture Maps is a project that intends to enable
| large players in the geospatial space (TomTom, Amazon, Microsoft,
| but notably _not_ Google) to leverage open data sets
| (OpenStreetMap among them) alongside proprietary data and
| processes that they own.
|
| The consortium intends to enable a framework for enhancing
| geospatial data based in open data sets (e.g. OSM) with their own
| proprietary processes, and re-release it with a permissive
| license (the Community Database License Agreement - CDLAv2), but
| keep the data and processes required to _create_ that dataset
| proprietary.
|
| The project has created a lot of conversation in the
| OpenStreetMap community, but in general I think it's good to see
| so many resources put into the OSM-adjacent world.
| gumby wrote:
| I came to ask for this info so thanks for the succinct summary!
| RicoElectrico wrote:
| Another bit of context: OSM mappers were quite discontent with
| edits of many of Overture members. Be it low-paid contractors
| or bulk importing stuff that AI derived from satellite imagery.
| grishka wrote:
| > bulk importing stuff that AI derived from satellite
| imagery.
|
| That's a thing? This must explain why Google Maps turned into
| shit over the last few years. Google seems obsessed with
| replacing humans with half-assed automation.
| RicoElectrico wrote:
| Yes, indeed. Google AI mapped skylights (roof windows) on a
| shopping mall near me as buildings.
| grishka wrote:
| In my city they made several buildings that overlap a
| river, and several more that overlap each other. It's
| been like that for at least 3 years.
| solardev wrote:
| Sounds like a fun city!
| culi wrote:
| I don't understand why big corporations find it so hard to
| see that the real potential in AI is usually in augmenting,
| not _replacing_, human labor
|
| Imagine how useful tools like that can be if they just had
| a human review process. That added step in the process not
| only improves the quality of the final data but provides
| important feedback to improve the tool itself
| culi wrote:
| Do you know when these contributions began? Has the scene
| changed much since then?
| alexchamberlain wrote:
| How do they do that? I thought OSM was licensed in such a way
| that if you combine it with other data, the whole thing needed
| to be released with the same license?
| tony_cannistra wrote:
| You are mostly right, except that in addition to the _same_
| license, the Share-Alike provision in the OSM license (the
| ODbL [0]) also enables derivatives to be re-released with "A
| compatible license."
|
| I am not a lawyer, but I would assume someone at Overture has
| deemed their license (the CDLAv2 [1]) to be "compatible" with
| ODbL. (edit: From the link in OP, the OSM-based data is being
| released with ODbL. I think I'm wrong about license
| compatibility. Again, not a lawyer.).
|
| [0]: https://opendatacommons.org/licenses/odbl/1-0/ [1]:
| https://cdla.dev/permissive-2-0/
| Doctor_Fegg wrote:
| CDLA Permissive is not downstream compatible with ODbL.
| ODbL is a sharealike licence, CDLA Permissive (as the name
| suggests) isn't. Overture can't relicense OSM-derived
| content under CDLA Permissive.
|
| From a brief skim of the landing page, it looks like the
| OSM-derived content is not being offered permissively. See
| https://overturemaps.org/download/.
| tony_cannistra wrote:
| You're right, I was mistaken.
| callalex wrote:
| These things don't matter when one side has 100x the lawyers
| of the other side.
| matkoniecz wrote:
| Not exactly.
|
| Are they releasing OSM data or OSM derived data on CDLAv2
| anywhere, right now?
|
| There was issue like this in past but it was resolved.
| matkoniecz wrote:
| Are they releasing OSM data or OSM derived data on CDLAv2
| anywhere?
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| Mithridates1 wrote:
| Does this add impedances to the OSM street segments?
| jijji wrote:
| I like that they provide this data, however when you try to
| actually retrieve it, It looks like they went out of their way to
| make it as convoluted as possible to try to retrieve any of the
| actual data.... so you have to use DuckDB and then do the import
| using that? why not just support mysql dump files? why require
| someone to have DuckDB? is DuckDB that popular? also the links
| they provide don't work so it doesn't look like any of it's
| available.... how is somebody supposed to use this stuff? they
| require you to also have Amazon S3 with some query language
| that's non-standard to be able to talk to it.... I don't get it
| I'm sure I'm not the only one but it needs to be more generic
| instead of the way they're doing it
| mdaniel wrote:
| yeah, I thought about mentioning that it's kind of rude to lock
| that data behind AWS or Azure accounts, but realistically no
| one can be surprised that Big Cloud Providers want people to
| use more big cloud services
|
| There's nothing stopping either AWS or Azure from granting
| `s3:Get _` and `s3:List_ ` on those buckets to enable
| unauthenticated reads, if they were thus interested
| kozikow wrote:
| Anyone loaded it to Bigquery yet?
|
| I know this is "booo-google", but I just want to write some joins
| with other tables I happen to have in bigquery. I'm wondering if
| there is some "community" BQ rather than maintaining import of my
| own.
| polemic wrote:
| It's unclear to me how Overture manages to "license wash" OSM
| data here.
|
| > _Transportation: The OMF's Transportation layer represents a
| worldwide road network derived from data in the OpenStreetMap
| project. This community-built data has been recast into the
| Overture data format which provides consistent segmentation of
| the data and a linear reference system to support additions of
| data such as speed limits or real-time traffic._
|
| The OSM ODbL is crystal clear that OSM contributors have to be
| credited. I don't believe that CDLA Permissive v2.0 magically
| allows Overture to bypass it.
|
| --EDIT: I missed that they're using different licenses per
| dataset, the transport theme is OBDL, which I'm sure will trip up
| users who are not careful.
| uneekname wrote:
| Overture could be seen as hostile to OpenStreetMap, but I do
| not think they are washing any licenses here. The article
| explicitly says that the CDLA license applies to data provided
| by Meta and Microsoft, not data from OSM. I think it's
| unfortunate that Meta and Microsoft aren't contributing their
| data to OSM instead of releasing it under a different license,
| but c'est la vie.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| Seems that any new data generated out of Overture Maps could be
| uploaded to OSM if they chose to do so? The CDLA license is
| permissive;
|
| https://cdla.dev/permissive-2-0/
|
| My read is that they're not going to avoid credited OSM, but
| rather they're going to credit OSM / maintain the license for
| the parts they use from OSM and then the rest will be CDLA 2.0
| licensed for anyone to use.
| joshstrange wrote:
| If you are looking for maps themselves (a la Google Maps) I
| highly recommend checking out Protomaps [0]. It provides a single
| file (PMTile format) that contains all the map data and you can
| request ranges from the single file to get the required vector
| data you need for a given area/zoom.
|
| So you can setup something like the following:
| S3 (host the myfile.pmtiles) <- Lambda (takes the x/y/z from the
| path and requests the correct range) <- Cloudfront cache tile
| response
|
| Then you can setup tiles.mydomain.com (or use the cloudfront
| domain directly) and then use Leaflet or similar on the frontend
| to fetch/render the tiles. For Leaflet you use the protomaps
| plugin/lib and give it a url like
| "https://tiles.yourdomain.com/20230408/{z}/{x}/{y}.mvt" where
| "20230408" maps to "20230408.pmtiles" in your S3 bucket. Now I
| can drop new pmtiles files into that bucket and update my clients
| to use the new source. And since the tiles are in vector format
| you can theme them however you want in the client which is neat.
| Lastly you don't have to use the 100+GB whole-earth tileset. You
| can use a tool [1] (provided by the same guy) to download a
| dataset for just a given geographical region.
|
| The .pmtiles file is a little over 100GB but the whole setup took
| me only an hour or two max to get running and will cost way less
| than Google Maps to run.
|
| [0] https://protomaps.com/
|
| [1] https://app.protomaps.com/downloads/small_map
| simmschi wrote:
| So one Lambda execution per tile?
| joshstrange wrote:
| Like the other comment says I don't think it's quite that bad
| but also CloudFront (or whatever CDN you use) is going to
| cache the response. In my case I'm rendering restaurant
| locations on a map. I only have X number of items that each
| have a map of the restaurants they are available at so unless
| people pan/zoom around a lot I only expect a handful of lamba
| calls and the resulting tile data will be cached in
| CloudFront for everyone else.
| wiredfool wrote:
| It shouldn't be required if the range requests are right and
| you have a compatible renderer in the client.
|
| To expand a bit -- There are adapters for mapbox(gl/libre)
| and leaflet, and so on that will allow you to use a .pmtiles
| directly from the client with a range request supporting
| server, like s3 or nginx.
|
| I've used protomaps basemaps to generate an Ireland and EU
| basemaps for a project from OSM data. I still haven't quite
| figured out the tuning for which features should be shown,
| combined, or excluded yet, and the generated layer names are
| sort of, but not quite compatible with similar base layers +
| styles from mapbox (which uses the same base data, but a
| different, proprietary conversion). This part takes a
| reasonable skill as a GIS person and some taste in the design
| of the feature symbology.
|
| The downside of doing this on S3 directly is that you might
| wind up publishing a link to a 100 gig file that would cost
| $10 if someone just downloaded it. Lambda invocations seem
| cheap compared to that risk. OTOH, throwing it on a hetzner
| box is quite reasonable.
| mdaniel wrote:
| their demo isn't doing them any favors since it seems to stop
| at some random zoomlevel, eliding the kind of detail that I'd
| care about if I were evaluating that solution
|
| digging into their GH repos surfaces
| https://protomaps.github.io/PMTiles/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fr2-pu...
| which is at least more detailed if not quite a GMaps killer
| qwertox wrote:
| I agree, if it weren't for your comment, I was about to ditch
| it as a candidate because it stopped zooming at a bad level.
| But your link shows that it contains a tremendous amount of
| data.
|
| Edit: And I missed parents link to
| https://app.protomaps.com/downloads/small_map which is
| actually better.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| Great stuff, at some point I feel like Google is going to have to
| try to extract even more revenue out of maps than they currently
| get and it will really empower these sorts of collaborative map
| systems.
|
| I wish there was a way for people to fund satellite imagery that
| got pushed into these systems after purchase. Sunnyvale, for
| example, paid for a lot of imagery of the city that they use/used
| in staff discussions about traffic, zoning, etc. It would be nice
| if they could then push those images into the open data set.
| Kadin wrote:
| There's really no technical reason why imagery like that
| couldn't be contributed, and IIRC Google does use municipally-
| owned imagery in its products. A single city might not be a big
| enough source for them to bother, I don't know, but I know
| particularly in Europe I have seen copyright notices for
| national and regional governments when looking at imagery.
|
| Though there are a lot of sources for satellite imagery right
| now; Google may not be that hard-up for new stuff. I suspect
| the commercial vendors they work with probably image the entire
| CONUS area every 12 months or so.
|
| The imagery that would seem to be more in-demand would be the
| aerial photos used at very high zoom levels. I'm not a
| geospatial expert but I think these images are combined with
| some sort of LIDAR or multi-spectrum imagery to have height
| maps in tandem with the visuals. That strikes me as pretty
| expensive to obtain.
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