Protomaps Blog

The pmtiles CLI now includes the highly requested merge command for combining multiple tilesets into a single archive.

The Protomaps project is the PMTiles format, its tooling, and a 120GB basemap vector cartographic tileset created from OpenStreetMap and other open data sources.

pmtiles.io is an open source viewer for PMTiles tilesets.

This is the first post explaining how the pmtiles extract command works to slice a smaller tileset from a larger one.

The Protomaps project consists of: The open PMTiles format; The tools and ecosystem for creating and publishing PMTiles; A basemap PMTiles created from OpenStreetMap data and other open sources.

Developing software for OpenStreetMap data all starts with the PBF - it’s nodes, ways and relations in the raw, native OSM format.

The PMTiles format is a cloud-native way to visualize map data in the browser, directly from cloud storage.

PMTiles is the open archive format that underlies the Protomaps ecosystem.

The Protomaps open source project is a recipient of a NLnet open source grant!

The Protomaps Project has gained several new repositories in the past year, including the serverless implementations for AWS and Cloudflare, and a new basemaps repository, which generates a full planet PMTiles archive from OpenStreetMap.

One detail in the PMTiles version 3 specification is a boolean flag called clustered.

Accelerating Maps Last year I described Protomaps Mantle, a commercial solution for self hosting planet-scale maps without running any servers.

PMTiles is a single-file archive format for map tiles, optimized for the cloud.

PMTiles is a single-file archive format for pyramids of tiled map data.

PMTiles is a single-file archive format for pyramids of tile data, like those used to power interactive maps.

Note: Mantle has been open-sourced and renamed, please see the latest blog post!

Protomaps is a new mapping system, and usually that implies a new map API - an HTTP service, hosted by a company somewhere Out There on the Web.

Protomaps is a independent project to build a new map of the world.

Update: This post describes the internals of the PMTiles v2 format.

If you develop for the web, you’ve probably heard of OpenStreetMap, an open data alternative to Google Maps.

A common user interaction in GIS applications is selecting a bounding box or polygon: Your application may then use this polygon to do things like: Render a high resolution, printable map image.