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. They are

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 be 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.

But it's also important to note that vector tiles are really rather specific predefined vector data targeted to visualization and thus not comparable to generic geospatial (vector) data formats.

More info

• Vector tiles specification: https://github.com/mapbox/vector-tile-spec
• Vector tiles on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_tiles Wikipedia
• The MBTiles specification is an efficient format for storing millions of vector tiles in a single SQLite database file.

Tools

For software around vector tiles see https://github.com/mapbox/awesome-vector-tiles .

See e.g. Vector Tiles Reader QGIS Plugin.