(unrelated to vector tiles but) at initial data load that’s doable fairly easily - I’ve done it for years on this map, and now also on its vector equivalent. That shows more Welsh-speaking areas with Welsh names and more English-speaking ones with English, using a rough polygon based on how many Welsh speakers there are in an area (and similarly to the north for Scots Gaelic). This approach doesn’t work for minutely updated data (either raster or vector) because the object that you know that there is an update for (such as a relation or a way) may not itself have any latitude or longitude associated with it. There are things that you might be able to do, but I haven’t tried them yet.
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But isn’t this more of a problem for specific name tags and less for the canonical, local name? Just use “name” and let the locals decide? Is there already a way to get “name” with the Open Maptiles, (name:latin?), and I think it should be offered as an option in the language menu. Also the map language and the interface language should not be coupled, they are mostly unrelated.
MapTiler can do it, choose Local in the top left. So i think OSM should be able to as well.
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The problem with “name” is that sometimes people shoehorn multiple values in there, for all sorts of valid local reasons. In Brussels’ case both names in the name tag are equally valid local values of name. Elsewhere where there is a “canonical local name” the name sometimes has other values in it, perhaps because the country is multiligual, even if the vast majority speaks one language and a small archipelago speaks the other.
Edited to add:
That looks like just the name tag and has the same issue that I described above.
Although I’ve been following the various threads regarding vector data in OSM, I don’t remember Colorful being mentioned as the official style for the new OSM vector face, I do remember that it was mentioned many times but as a style for testing purposes.
A very important selection that must be somewhere, I sincerely expected something more similar to OSM Carto or what MapTiler has already done with its OSM style. Colorful is pretty bland and still has a long way to go. I wanted to ask:
- Now that Colorful is in OSM, who will decide on what style design?
- Issues are added, but who will decide what should be added to the vector tile schema or not?
- And for me the most important, why was it decided to name the new vector facet of OSM as Shortbread and not OSM vector or any other name other than Shortbread? I thought the mutual relationship was only developmental, and once the product was delivered, the direct maintainers would be OSM.
- Finally, I wanted to ask, why is a mini-golf more important than a natural=peak or a natural=volcano? I can’t find the peaks and volcanoes anywhere.
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I think it’s worth taking a step back here. The Shortbread Schema is fairly new, and is a deliberately “light” schema so that the tiles aren’t massive. peak doesn’t seem to be in the schema. I’m sure that a case could be made for adding it to the next version of it.
There are two parts to this - the steering committee for the Shortbread schema can be found on this page - you’ll probably recognise many of the names. Issues can be found here - you can see that @pnorman has created some that have come to light during his deployment of the schema.
Whether it makes sense to try and use this schema for an “OSM Carto” replacement on osm.org is a different question - I personally don’t think it does, but the decision to deploy a known, light schema as a proof of concept absolutely makes sense to me, rather than trying to iterate on everything at the same time. What would be really helpful (as noted above) would be to try and diagnose where issues actually exist.
The really new deliverable from @pnorman here is minutely updated vector tiles. There is still work to do (see discussions elsewhere about wonky churches at high zooms due to the vector tile implementation)
Why don’t you have a go at creating your own version? I have** - essentially all that you need to deploy is a .json file that points at the new vector tiles.
** and obviously I prefer that to Versatiles Colorful on grounds of taste, but that’s just me 
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Did anybody manage to get a minimal maplibre example running against https://vector.openstreetmap.org ? Would love to see one.
(to add a bit more info) it is composed of the “svwd03” files in this repository. The readme describes how it can be deployed and all of the components. The icons are ones that I’ve mostly created, in some case derived from OSM Carto originals. The fonts used are from Klokantech, in turn based on Google’s noto. I wrote the scripts to tie it all together.
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for some questions it can indeed be a problem (not really an unsurmountable one, once you become acquainted with the typical separators you can usually make sense of it, especially in combination with additional name tags where the language is specified), but it can also be seen as a feature: local name label, what people living there would expect to see on a map.
Thank you for this breakdown of the various components, @Minh_Nguyen. I’ve noticed some inconsistency with the tile updating and I was hoping one of the tables in your post would direct me to the right place to report an issue. I’m still not quite sure though.
Here is some forest detail I recently added. Some tiles have updated since but others have not (yes, I have cleared my browser cache). The result is inconsistent views like this, where new tiles with more forest detail are co-mingled with less detailed, older tiles:
Would this be something to report to the tile host (OSMF OWG), the tile configuration (Spirit Shortbread), or the tile generator (Tilekiln)?
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Thank you for taking the time to respond.
Likewise, I have done it too, but logically a style coming from professionals in the field is not the same as a style designed by an amateur like me, my style is a modification of OpenStreetMap MapTiler with some little extra things like 3d, shading, contour lines, small changes in colors and shapes of some elements to make them more visible and eye-catching, etc. Currently it points to MapTiler and MapBox URLs (2 styles, 1 sources per provider), I am currently studying Vector Tile Schema 1.0 to migrate to those layers ID, and for the moment locally (localhost…) on the .mbtiles geofabrik built for Shortbread and
https://tiles.versatiles.org/tiles/osm/{z}/{x}/{y}
I also did it, only partially. Regarding this, What are the URLs that point to the new vector tiles?
https://vector.openstreetmap.org/$VERSION/{zoom}/{x}/{y}.mvt
https://vector.openstreetmap.org/$VERSION/tilejson.json
Are they working? Where can I find information about the version number? OpenStreetMap should have its own documentation away from Vector Tile Schema 1.0?
I understand that it is a joint effort, but it seems that it does not belong to us since everything points towards Shortbread, Versatiles and a Shortbread Scheme Steering Committee. Shouldn’t there be an OSM steering committee for OSM vector data?
That’s what I understood and what was announced more than a year ago in:
2024: announcing the year of the OpenStreetMap vector maps
Where it says that:
To lead our vector tiles project, the OpenStreetMap Foundation has hired Paul Norman…
If this relationship breaks down tomorrow, who will be left with the minutely updated vector data project?
Them or us?
As I see it so far, everything points to third-party resources: style, documentation, committee, scheme,… and the only thing that belongs to OSM is the data and Vector Tile Usage Policy
I apologize for the above, but I was expecting a vector environment revolving around the name OpenStreetMap only, maybe due to my little experience in OSM I expected something else or I’m just misinterpreting everything.
I also knew it and I think it’s fabulous, I was waiting for something similar to this style. Would you be willing to share the .json of your style?
Perfectly understandable and logical for any newly born project.
I’m using a definition here that I got from this forum post. The version number I’m using is “shortbread_v1”.
That’s here. Some of the parameters in there are modified by scripts that are used to install it on a particular server; the readme has more detail and an example command to deploy on a web server.
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Something seems odd with the name of cities in the Shortbread tiles, like all the major cities I added in red seems having a quite low draw priority. It’s similar in your style and in the OSM-version, so I assume that’s not related to the style??
Eg. in Carto, Detroit is more prominent over Lansing and so is New York over Trenton, so I would think OSM-data is fine as well. Chicago and Milwaukee also showing up earlier than Madison on Carto.
Yes, in principle it is feasible. I slapped one together back when the tile server was in testing. Unfortunately, it would currently be difficult to integrate an interactive debug overlay directly into the main osm.org homepage, because the maplibre-gl-leaflet compatibility shim gets in the way of any interactivity. We’d need to migrate to MapLibre GL JS for real in order to support a lot of the interactive features that people desire from vector tile technology:
If you’ve been following this effort for a while, you might’ve seen this tile demo page appear late last year. As a temporary workaround, here’s an idea for repurposing that page as a QA tool for the OSMF-produced tiles:
This should be straightforward:
As I understand it, the OSMF has so far funded the implementation of a minutely vector tile service. By itself, this is a big deal, but the raw tiles are only useful to software developers. The Shortbread layer – with the VersaTiles Colorful stylesheet and soon the Eclipse stylesheet for dark mode users – is a minimal approach to delivering the tiles in a more usable format for mappers. Developing a custom schema and style requires a lot of time and effort and hard decisions. Think of this style as a placeholder and hopefully motivation for ambitious mapmakers to contribute their efforts toward more featured styles.
The MapTiler OMT style is one of at least half a dozen ports of the OSM Carto design to vector stylesheet technology at varying stages of completion. This allows the designers to skip a lot of difficult cartographic decisions by copying an existing style, leaning on our familiarity with that style. However, raster and vector technology have different strengths and weaknesses. If a vector style copies OSM Carto too literally, it could fall into an uncanny valley: not quite achieving OSM Carto’s look and feel while also foregoing the many advantages of vector technology. Hopefully these styles’ designers will eventually go beyond their predecessors and innovate new approaches. In the same way, OSM Americana pays homage to paper maps, which have obvious technical constraints, while continuing to experiment with features that paper maps never had.
Inconsistency like that would most likely be a tile server issue. (In the span of a few hours, this thread has already touched on naming and cache invalidation, which is basically all of computer science!)
I don’t think we have a dedicated issue tracker for the tile server, so you could report the problem in the operations team’s main issue tracker. If that isn’t the right place, the operations team can move it to a different repository.
According to this comment, the $VERSION is actually the style’s name and version, for example, shortbread_v1 for the currently deployed version of the Shortbread layer’s style. You can see this if you monitor the osm.org homepage in your browser’s network inspector. Another issue you’ll run into is that the stylesheet is invalid out of the box unless you turn relative paths into absolute URLs.
At vector zoom level 5 (raster z6), the Shortbread tiles only contains the cities you saw labeled, shown here as red dots:
The Spirit Shortbread implementation shows only national and state capitals at z4 and z5:
This is consistent with the Shortbread schema specification, so if you want different behavior, the repository for the Shortbread schema documentation would be the place to request it.
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The ones that follow this thread know about the content of the new layers, the styles, which layer varies with language selection. For other users, it would be informative if the attribution for each layer contained a link to a wiki describing this specific layer.
In the case of the Shortbread layer, this is intentional. Different styles have different goals, and even if they have the same goals they can reach them in different ways.
@Minh_Nguyen and @SomeoneElse have done a good job at point at the different components involved. I also did a diary post on this.
A style using the Shortbread vector tiles is now live on OpenStreetMap.org. There’s been some minor issues with the roll-out, but nothing that caused me to panic. I’ve been taking a couple of days to unwind and relax, as this has been a major milestone.
A feature like this includes work across multiple projects, so people have been asking where to report issues.
- Any issues that are present on the OpenStreetMap website but not on the vector demo page should be reported to openstreetmap-website. Some issues reported have been with attribution controls and strange panning at extremely high zooms
- Style issues (e.g. colors, symbology, fonts, etc) are handled by the VersaTiles Colorful and VersaTiles Eclipse styles. Both can be found in a VersaTiles repository.
- What is supposed to be in the tiles is defined in the Shortbread Vector Tile Schema 1.0. There are lists of what features should appear, and where they should appear.
- The code responsible for what is actually in the tiles is contained in the Street Spirit repo. If something is missing that is supposed to be in Shortbread, this needs fixing. This also handles simplifcation and other parts of generating the tiles.
- The software that serves the tiles is Tilekiln. If the wrong HTTP headers are being sent, this is where you report it.
- The chef code pulls everything together on the OSMF servers. It’s unlikely you should report an issue directly here.
- Some font rendering issues are part of MapLibre GL JS. This is most likely to come up in Southeast Asia.
If I were to disappear it is all open source and could be continued. This is the same as the Standard layer as that depends on OpenStreetMap Carto and Mapnik, neither of which is controlled by the OpenStreetMap Foundation.
As an aside, I’m far more worried about the points of failure in the raster tile stack. mod_tile is the equivalent to tilekiln but it has 16x as many lines of code, and probably less development going into it. Mapnik is now doing regular releases but it’s gone three years between releases before. OpenStreetMap Carto has gone about 9 months since the last release.
One of the servers is catching up due to an operation issue during an update. It should be done in a couple days.
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Thanks @pnorman & @Firefishy! I’ll check back in a few days and hopefully the tiles will update consistently once the replication delay drops to a reasonable level.
You can also throw a vector style or tilesets into the Maputnik style editor. Then in the view tab you can switch to inspect the tiles.
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QGis is my tool of choice when I need to inspect the high-level contents of a vector tile.