New written standards for the new maps?

WhereCamp Berlin, 2015

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

Topics1. What “standards” are now in use2. Issues for everyday developer3. What can be done to improve it?

Official geo standards• OGC stack

– GML– KML– WMS (and WMSC, TMS, SDL)– WFS (and WFS-T)– GeoPackage

• IETF– GeoJSON

De facto standards in real life• OSM

– Tile API• MapBox stack

– Vector tile - PBF• Content of vector tile – layers, tags

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)

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, ???

Navigation standards ?• Some are established

– NDS– Not too open

• Quite specific niche

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

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

Next steps1. Communication

– Makes sense ?– Role models for similar problems ?– Agree with key players of key projects

2. Establish discussion medium3. 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

Thank you!Jaak Laineste founder and technical leadjaak@nutiteq.com@jaaklwww.nutiteq.com