Hi Paul,
Thanks so much for all your hard work, dedication to the maps project, and
your devotion to documenting as your time with the Foundation is ending. It
was great to work with you to create and refine the new map style; I
sincerely hope we can get it deployed someday.
Cheers and see ya around the map,
Deb
On Tue, Jul 24, 2018 at 2:03 PM Paul Norman <paul(a)paulnorman.ca> wrote:
The current WMF map rendering software is already
vector tile based. The
work was about disputed borders, changing the vector tile schema, and
cartography improvements.
MapTiler and openmaptiles aren't really that related. I went over
openmaptiles in the section on vector schema lessons learned.
On Jul 24, 2018 2:58 AM, Naveen Francis <naveenpf(a)wikimedia.in> wrote:
Sad to hear that WMF is not deploying vector map now.
For WMF, 'internal politics' is the key for any projects they take up.
Is this an implementation of vector sytle ?
https://www.maptiler.com/cloud/#streets/kn/vector/7.18/77.534/19.724
https://openmaptiles.org/schema/
The vector tile schema has been developed by Klokan Technologies GmbH
<https://www.klokantech.com/> and was initially modelled after the
cartography of the Carto Basemap Positron
<https://carto.com/location-data-services/basemaps/>. The vector tile
schema has been refined and improved in cooperation with the Wikimedia
Foundation <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Maps> and is heavily
influenced by the many years Paul Norman's experience of creating maps from
OpenStreetMap.
Thanks,
Naveen Francis
<http://wikibooks.in>
On Mon, Jul 23, 2018 at 4:56 AM, Paul Norman <paul(a)paulnorman.ca> wrote:
For some time I’ve been working as a contractor developing a new style and
vector tile schema for the Wikimedia Foundation. It’s been completed but
not deployed for several months. As my contract finishes this month and
Wikimedia Foundation leadership has decided to not deploy the new map
styles, I’m writing up a technical lessons learned from my experiences on
the style. I’m not going to be discussing the organizational factors that
lead to the decision, but looking at how I’d code things differently if
starting over.
*Overview*
A complete map style consists of three parts: The database loading rules,
the feature selection rules, and the styling rules. For a style written in
the languages used by the WMF stack, these are expressed in osm2pgsql
instructions, a tm2source project with SQL, and CartoCSS. The first tells
you how to get the data into the database, the second defines what data
goes into the vector tiles, and the third is how to draw features in the
vector tiles. What goes in the vector tiles is also known as the “schema”
and can be expressed in terms of what features appear and when, e.g.
secondary roads first appear on zoom 12. For increased confusion, the
database also has a “schema”, both of which are distinct from a PostgreSQL
“SCHEMA.”
In the current style, the parts are the osm2pgsql C transforms,
osm-bright.tm2source, and WMF’s fork of osm-bright.tm2. In the new style,
the parts are ClearTables + osm2pgsql, meddo, and brighmed.
The goal with the style changes was to improve the representation of
disputed borders, switch to a vector tile schema without a legal cloud over
it, and make some styling improvements. In this it succeeded.
*Database schema*
The decision was made early on to go with ClearTables. This is an
alternative set of rules for osm2pgsql which loads the data into many more
tables for greater performance, easier style rules, and a bigger layer of
abstraction between raw OSM tags and the SQL you need to write. It was
started by me before my work at WMF and only a few features were added.
ClearTables does what it is designed to do, yet it was a mistake for this
project. I still believe it is technically a better solution, yet the
advantages are not worth the costs of doing something different.
The two most common database schemas are the built-in osm2pgsql “C
transforms” and the OpenStreetMap Carto. They aren’t any better code - with
ClearTable’s test suite, it’s probably got fewer bugs, but there are many
guides on how to set them up, and it requires fewer components.
Setting up the database isn’t an issue for WMF production servers, but is
considered one of the more difficult steps for potential contributors to
any style. Minimizing differences from other setups here helps greatly. A
second issue is that many potential users of the style already have a
database. I have heard from multiple people who would like to run the style
if it could be used with their existing databases.
*Static data*
Map styles need some forms of “static” data loaded such as oceans,
low-zoom data, and borders. Normally this is done on an ad-hoc basis with a
long complicated shp2pgsql or ogr2ogr command, but I wrote a python script
that downloads the data and loads it with ogr2ogr, as well as handling all
the SQL needed to update the data without a service interruption.
This script is useful enough that I have reused it for other projects,
which was made easy because I didn’t hard-code the files used into the
script, but used another file to define them.
*Borders*
One of the drivers of the work was to better display disputed borders. To
do this a pre-processing step was considered necessary, and I wrote a
necessary program in C++ with libosmium. This worked, but I should have
made more of an effort to get it packed by Debian GIS and run on Jochen
Toph’s
OpenStreetMapData.com servers so others could use the work to
encourage more developers to participate in maintenance. I should also have
given pyosmium a more detailed look.
Vector tile schema
One of the reasons for switching to a new schema was legal threats against
people using the Mapbox Streets schema. This meant osm2vectortiles also had
to switch schemas at the same time. There was an effort to work with them
to use a common schema, but it never happened because we had different
needs. In retrospect, we should have either gone with a common schema and
tm2source project, or done nothing in common. Either choice is valid, and
it’s a balance of coordination work against a common development direction.
It was useful to have someone external to discuss ideas with, but this
wouldn’t have been required with other people on the team.
*Style*
The original plan was to largely stick with the cartography of osm-bright.
This changed once we got into implementation and we realized how insane
some parts of the osm-bright cartography were, and efforts were made
towards redoing the style.
The road colours selected were from ColorBrewer2 OrRd6, with casing
colours done by adjusting the Lch lightness and chroma. It would have been
better to pick endpoints and generate colours using a script, similar to
osm-carto. This would have allowed easier changes and sped up development
by reducing the number of variables that need to be manually set.
*Overall*
The style was completed successfully in time, and none of the changes
would have significantly changed that. They would have mainly made it
easier to attract external contributors if an effort were put into that. As
attracting external contributors wasn’t a priority, they didn’t matter.
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