Vector Tiles
Vector tiles are roughly-square shaped "tiles" containing vector geometries and metadata – like road names, place names, house numbers – in a compact, structured format. Vector tiles are rendered by a client, like a web browser (Mapbox GL JS), a mobile app (Mapbox iOS SDK, Mapbox Android SDK), or a desktop GIS (Vector Tiles Reader QGIS Plugin). They can also rendered on the fly to usual raster tiles on the server and delivered as raster image tiles (WMTS). Thus, expensive clipping and geometry generalization operations are performed in advance.
Vector tiles have important advantages over fully rendered image tiles:
- Styling: As vectors, tiles can be styled when requested, allowing for many map styles on global data
- Size: Vector tiles are small, enabling global high resolution maps, fast map loads
- Caching: The tiling allows efficient caching
- Decentralization: Rendering takes place in distributed (GPU) processors.
Useful info:
- Specification: https://github.com/mapbox/vector-tile-spec
- Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_tiles Wikipedia
Tools
For software around vector tiles see https://github.com/mapbox/awesome-vector-tiles .
See e.g. Vector Tiles Reader QGIS Plugin.
