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 typically preprocessed for a certain purpose and for several zoom levels (typically 1 to 14). Preprocessing means that expensive filtering (database queries), vector geometry clipping and cartographic generalization operations are performed in advance.
Vector tiles are rendered by either 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 on a server and delivered as common raster image tiles (WMTS).
Vector tiles have some advantages over fully rendered raster image tiles:
- Styling: As vectors, tiles can be styled when requested and on-the-fly, allowing for many map styles on global data
- Size: Vector tiles are small, enabling global high resolution maps, fast map loads
- Caching: As with raster tiles, the tiling allows efficient caching
- Decentralization: Rendering takes place in distributed (GPU) processors.
On the other hand, it's important to note that vector tiles are rather specific 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 is an efficient format for storing millions of vector tiles in a single SQLite database file.
Vector Tiles Providers
- MapBox Map Styles
- MapZen Vector Tiles
- osm2vectortiles.org by Geometa Lab & Klokan Technologies
Tools
For software around vector tiles see https://github.com/mapbox/awesome-vector-tiles .
See e.g. Vector Tiles Reader QGIS Plugin.
