I talked with cbeddow from Mapillary about missing data in vector tiles. This comes up often:
There are no trees included.
There is no 3D data included. (me!)
I want really all tagging in vector tiles.
My answer: Wait for it, let OSM establish a good server for vector tiles, shaped for 2D mapping, for the most needed data. But then, in addition to each of this tile files we should have an additional file, containing all remaining data. That may be only for the detailed zoom level.
There are tools like OpenMapTiles with schemata for 2D mapping. Could we build a schema for “all remaining” tiles? Just to test, whether this concept works.
I could run a tile generator for a small region on my own device, couldn’t I?
but not in all zoom levels I guess
Vector tiles, like raster tiles, will require a selection of things, maybe there can be fat highzoom tiles, but it will still be a decision up to when include what. E.g. you won’t likely be able to render a continentscale railway map with generic map tiles.
Most of the “missing” data is about street lights or waste baskets etc. That’s only relevant in the high zoom. But selection is not what I mean. “ALL" means “all", except: my idea was to include only those missing objects, which are NOT already in the existing “2D" vector tiles. And if they get to “fat” / large, we can split them in even more detailed zoom levels.
Still, there may be “ALL-2D” tiles in lower zoom levels, for large objects / multipolygons / relations like countries or railways. The selection may be the same as the “2D” tiles. They have simplified shapes. But do the “2D" also include ALL the tagging? The names in all given languages? If not, an accompanying “ALL-2D” tiles will help. That’s to be evolved while using it.
If a world- / continent-scale railway map shall show every single track, It needs zooming. If you want all OSM tagging accessible, in low zoom you will only able to select the large lines and see may be the name in the language, you set at yur client. Zoom in will load/show/selectable more detailed tiles both for visualisation and for “ALL” data.
The art of rendering would be the seamless zooming in this case. Small tracks may gentle blend in and out or change the line thickness. I doubt, the actually schemata have settings for blending.
I do not think of searching for every detailed track reference offline. A smart phone will simply not be able store all the data. As the tiles are loaded as needed, the search needs to be done on the server. - But still, one may download and store relevant tiles and could search in this data, like OrganicMaps does.
@Jochen_Topf Yes, that’s an extended analysis of the “ALL” tiles. I do not know most of the mentioned tools. Your "How to do it?” extends my knowledge. And they may not run on my Mac Air 2018
I hope to find a tool like OpenMapTiles to test generate ALL tiles, experiment with the schemata and usefulness, mainly for my 3D renderer www.OSMgo.org If someone could give me a hand, it would be appreciated.
But as you have a running server, like X-RAY, I could use it too for www.OSMgo.org etc. Hurray! WAMap too, but only the supported area. I filtered for "building:part”, yes!!!
Useful? Because it’s there! There alway will a mad nerd, doing new and interesting things. And you had other good examples too.
Rendering? May not be the target. Or may, but client side with dynamic options. Just by zooming or by settings.
Few kilobytes: We may split it into the next zoom level. About like Cesium does.
bad data: Yes! Partly this should be done while the tiles are generated. This will also give us ways to improve OSM by seeing and fixing them.
combinations, as far as not bad data: Renderer certainly need a fallback to unexpected data. Still selectable though. OSMgo shows red cylinders or areas in this case.
Styling language should not be the limit but to be extended.
Generating tiles on demand, may be a small cache seems a good idea for the first experiments.
Level 0 / low levels are not needed firsthand. That “close” analysis of OSM tagging is only at the maximum level relevant. But if I thing about 3D rendering, the fare away view should show something, but not all details. We have to filter here, like large buildings and towers.
The Application - Showing the tiles is not part of your problem, but you solved it well.
difficult to navigate this map full of black dots: Again zoom is a way. Single node objects may show up later while zooming.
What’s next? How to handle selected objects and filtering in low zoom levels? The user will tell you more. Firstly I would use the same filers as for the “normal tiles, used for 2D maps”.
I am open to ideas: Later, I am sure. May be splitting large tiles by zoom++. It would be nice to see the zoom level in the XRAY UI. A search in the UI would be useful as the map invisible covered with dots. And a goto my position.
There could be a browser context menu (2nd mouse) with: Open a new tab with OSM, ID, OSMgo, …
Just to add another couple of links that might be useful, see here and here.
If you want to create your own tiles, this diary entry I wrote a while back might be helpful. I can’t comment on your Macbook, but renting a server for a day to follow that diary entry would cost about €0.20 . Once you’ve got your tiles you can copy them to and serve them from anywhere you like - they’re just flat files.
Just jumping in to say that tiles with All The Things are great and we should try and make them available more broadly. I’ve been keeping a few US States worth of tiles up to date for a year now and it’s really nice and useful!
@SomeoneElse linked to WAMap but I also have UTMap and @iandees had tiles up for a World version of the map at some point (very similar to X-Ray).
You’ll definitely need to have some editorializing about low zoom tiles but you can actually get a lot lot lot of stuff in there.
