2022-08-26, 12:00–12:30 (Europe/Rome), Room 4
Converting OpenStreetMap planet data into vector tiles has been a complex and costly process, but now, thanks to the Planetiler project, it has become possible to do on a single powerful machine in just a few hours – over two orders of magnitude speed up!
OpenMapTiles is a mature customizable tile generation framework and layer specification that can be tailored to specific tile generation needs. It has existed for many years, and allowed users to generate their own layers, optimizing for size or completeness. Over the years it moved to PostGIS-based ST_AsMVT approach, and made numerous small improvements. The biggest downside of OMT was the extensive hardware requirements.
Recently Mike Barry rewrote core functionality of the OMT stack as a single monolithic app, making it possible to generate entire planet data in just a few hours on a single machine. Now the OMT community is actively adapting this new approach, researching if Rust would be even better approach, and experimenting how to make the process customizable and support real-time updates.
My interests are maps, data visualizations, large datasets, Vega-js and OpenStreetMap. I'm the author of Wikipedia API, maps, and graphs systems. I work as a principal devops engineer at Elastic.