The UN Vector Tile System (draft)

The goal

More eyes of people are on more geospatial information by sharing simplifed the way to produce and host well styled and size optimized vector tiles.

The structure of the system

Because we are small in comparison to what we can do, we needed an efficient and distributed way to implement the goal.

What I can propose will be as below.

The UN Vector Tile Toolkit

A software toolkit that combines Tippecanoe, Vector Tile optimizer, Maputnik, and custom Node.js scripts to enable public organizations to produce, host, style, and optimize their vector tiles.

rasv: RPi implementation of the UN Vector Tile Toolkit

The UN Vector Tile Toolkit implemented on Docker for Raspberry Pi (RPi). This will help demo and technology transfer easier. The computing infrastructure for the UN Vector Tile Toolkit shall be as inexpensive as training textbooks.

I think PRi is important for us because they have a vision of learn and teach through making. We need to benefit from this vision.

Adopt Geodata project

This is a project aimed for (1) making more vector tiles available and (2) making vector tile technology more common.

We adopt geospatial open data which are not yet in vector tiles. Each of us convert the data into vector tiles and host on her or his own server.

We may need to have a humble hub site that share the results achived by the participants. But a hashtag might be good enough.

An engineering community

rasv and Adopt Geodata project will increase tansible demos. However, it might not be very visible from starters.

We might need an engineer community that share training materials online and discuss online.

This community might use GitHub, hackmd, speakerdeck and YouTube to implement itself.