OpenMapTiles: Vector Tiles from OpenStreetMap

Published January 17th, 2017

Vector tiles fro OpenStreetMap

After months of work, we are thrilled to announce a new game-changing open-source project!

OpenMapTiles provides the fastest way how to setup custom styled world maps with open-source software. In a few minutes, you can have your own OpenStreetMap tile server - ready for use in your websites or products. 

Just download the pre-generated vector tiles and get started

The project turns the publicly available OpenStreetMap data into ready-to-use packages containing vector tiles for the whole planet, individual countries and major cities.

Downloaded map tiles can be displayed on websites with JavaScript viewers, used in native mobile applications on Android and iOS (even offline), or turned into traditional raster tiles or high-resolution images for printing.

There are online guides to get started.2017-01-17-openmaptiles-vector-tiles-from_2.jpg

Open Map Styles & Open Tile Schema

We have prepared a set of beautiful Open Map Styles for our vector tiles. The styles are free and open-source, and you can adapt the design and code for your project or commercial product however you like. Either use one of our map styles directly as your base map or as a starting point for your own map design. You can also use an open-source visual map style editor.2017-01-17-openmaptiles-vector-tiles-from_3.pngOpen Map Styles compatible with OpenMapTiles Vector Tiles

Our new Vector Tile Schema is encoding the cartography decisions made on top of OpenStreetMap, Natural Earth and other OpenData sources and is 100% open and free to use, extend or build upon. We hope people will adapt, copy and reimplement our schema and data model in their projects while providing attribution.

Open-source tools and no vendor lock-in

The whole project is open-source, documented and comes with a license which is friendly even for business use (BSD + CC-BY). The project reuses existing many open-source components, map designs and open standards from the OSM & FOSS community and Mapbox Inc. The work on the new open vector tile schema was done in cooperation with Paul Norman and Wikimedia Foundation and was initially modelled after the cartography of the Positron base map from Carto (former CartoDB), with their permission.

With OpenMapTiles there is no lock-in to a single hosting platform or provider, and interested parties can adopt our workflow and do the tile generating as well as hosting completely independently and in-house. We offer a set of services and preprocessed data - including worldwide contour lines and hill shading datasets - to speed up the adoption of the project and applications in production use.

The OpenMapTiles project is a successor of OSM2VectorTiles, a project which won the OpenStreetMap Innovation Award of 2016 at SOtM in Brussels and which started in Switzerland as a student bachelor thesis at HSR Rapperswil in cooperation with Klokan Technologies GmbH.

Support and community

The team behind OpenMapTiles is available for commercial support and consulting and can assist with deployment and applications of the maps in products and services.

Contributions to the source code from the community are very welcome! 

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Petr Pridal

Petr Pridal

CEO
Published on January 17th, 2017