Protomaps is a serverless system for planet-scale maps, it's an umbrella project consisting of a few different components one of which is PMtiles.
PMtiles is “Cloud Optimise Geotiff” for web mapping, what this means is that you can build a base map and host it without the need for a server!
PMtiles is a single file that you can access via HTTP range requests in the same way that you can access data within a Cloud Optimised Geotiff with the important difference that PMtiles can also contain vector data!
What this means is that you can create your own base map, and host it on something like Amazon S3 object storage at a fraction of the cost of other base map solutions!
During this episode, you will hear Brandon, the founder, and creator of Protomaps, talk about scarcity, and well I have never really thought about base maps as being a scarce resource I can definitely see how a product like PMtiles could remove some of the barriers to entry for a lot of creativity in terms of base maps.
More information on Protomaps is here: https://protomaps.com/
Tippecanoe
https://github.com/felt/tippecanoe.git
https://bertt.wordpress.com/2023/01/06/creating-vector-pmtiles-with-tippecanoe/
Relevant podcast episodes
Cloud Optimized Point Clouds
https://mapscaping.com/podcast/cloud-optimized-point-clouds/
Cloud Native Geospatial
https://mapscaping.com/podcast/cloud-native-geospatial/
Microsoft’s Planetary computer
https://mapscaping.com/podcast/the-planetary-computer/
Stamen Design - Full Stack Cartography
https://mapscaping.com/podcast/full-stack-cartography/
If you have any questions or comments, let me know, I would love to hear from you!
