The UN Open GIS (Geographic Information System) Initiative, led by the United Nations Geospatial Network, aims to develop an Open Source GIS bundle to support UN operations. Supported by various partners, including Member States and international organizations, this initiative focuses on addressing capability gaps in GIS and improving the efficiency of Open Source GIS worldwide.
As part of this Initiative and among other projects, the UN Vector Tile Toolkit was developed by members of the UN Open GIS. It’s a tool that assists public organizations in creating vector tiles´to be used as basemaps. The objective is to provide a user-friendly environment for producing basemaps similar to those offered by popular web map platforms. This effort is part of a broader goal, the Global mapping project, which created in 1996 led to the creation of a global map covering elevation, land cover and vegetation.
The structure of the UN Vector Tile Toolkit uses existing open source software while incorporating customized scripts developed and openly shared by the UN community. The toolkit consists of several key functions.
The import function retrieves data from various sources such as PostGIS, ESRI Shapefile, OSM PBF, GeoJSON Text Sequence, and GeoJSON Vector Tiles. Layer names and zoom levels are assigned to the imported data using specific open source scripts.
The Host function employs Node.js scripts to host modular vector tile packages, ensuring simplicity and scalability. Some scripts emulate the behaviour of an ArcGIS Server, guaranteeing optimal performance and interoperability.
As oversized vector tiles can significantly slow down applications, the Optimize function focuses on enhancing the performance of the vector tile service., New scripts have been developed to calculate and visualize individual tile size distribution, enabling targeted optimization.
The UN has already developed a global vector tile prototype for internal use, optimizing individual tile sizes to be under 128KB and ensuring interoperability with ArcGIS Server Vector Tile Service. The goal is to achieve automatic and continuous updates within one day of database updates, and the global vector tile dataset can currently be produced within a week.The first version of the UN Vector Tile Toolkit was released in a FOSS4G Asia 2018 keynote speech. Members of the UN Open GIS consist of Contributors and Observers, who actively participate in the initiative's activities, among which the Geospatial Information Authority of Japan is using the toolkit to prototype their vector tile production.
You can learn more about the project with this paper from the main developers of this project. Overall, the UN Vector Tile Toolkit represents a significant step in empowering public organizations to create and utilize high-quality vector tiles for basemaps, promoting efficient and effective mapping solutions.
Comments
When reporting about any "open source" project, redactors should always provide at least the licensing conditions: is it Apache, MIT, EUPL, GPL ?
This would save the reader long and sometimes fruitless research...
Good point. We've discussed it here in the office and we'll try to do this in future.
We do generally check this anyway, so it shouldn't be difficult to also add a link and a note in the articles.
Thanks!