WhereCamp Berlin - about (mobile) map standards

1. New written standards for
the new maps?
WhereCamp Berlin, 2015

2. Introduction
• Nutiteq – like Google Maps API MapBox, but:
– Country-based offline support
– OSM and other sources (HERE, in-house)
– Focus to mobile: Android, iOS, WP, Xamarin
.NET
– Offline routing and geocoding *
– 3D city extensions
– GIS extensions: editing, GDAL, Proj integration
etc
– Mobile maps in apps since 2007

3. Topics
1. What “standards” are now in use
2. Issues for everyday developer
3. What can be done to improve it?

4. Official geo standards
• OGC stack
– GML
– KML
– WMS (and WMSC, TMS, SDL)
– WFS (and WFS-T)
– GeoPackage
• IETF
– GeoJSON

5. De facto standards in real life
• OSM
– Tile API
• MapBox stack
– Vector tile - PBF
• Content of vector tile – layers, tags

8. De facto standards in real life
• OSM
– Tile API
• MapBox stack
– Vector tile - PBF
• Content of vector tile – layers, tags
– MBTiles
– TileJSON
– UTFGrid
– Mapnik XML
– CartoCSS
– GL style
– Simplestyle (GeoJSON extension)

9. Other de facto standards (mobile)
• Map tile formats
– CartoDB torque tiles
– Various other vector tiles
• Offline map packages
– graphhopper .ghz
– mapsforge .map
– maps.me packages
• Upcoming areas
– routing and geocoding package formats
• In-device (JS, Java etc) API standards
– “Google MapView API”
• Location Intelligence standards
– SQL, big data, ???

10. Navigation standards ?
• Some are established
– NDS
– Not too open
• Quite specific niche

11. Key issues with de facto standards
• Active work in progress
– Implementations unstable and incomplete
• Not that open
– Original vendor lock-in
– Feel fee to (ignore) PR
• Everyone forks to extend
• Some become unmaintained, but still in use
• Quite a mess

12. Solution ideas
• Lets agree new system to handle it!
• Organizational
– KISS and flexible
– Avoid single vendor lock-in
• Technical
– CI - style technical test suites
– Optimized for development speed

13. Next steps
1. Communication
– Makes sense ?
– Role models for similar problems ?
– Agree with key players of key projects
2. Establish discussion medium
3. Call for a meta-standard
– How we describe, share and test standards
– Decision process
– Compliance rules, like “OSI/FSF etc-compliant
license”
4. Execute and improve

14. Thank you!
Jaak Laineste
founder and technical lead
jaak@nutiteq.com
@jaakl
www.nutiteq.com