Our highlights from FOSS4G 2019

Published September 6th, 2019

FOSS4G team photo

The amazing FOSS4G (Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial) international conference once again took place in late August, this time in Bucharest, Romania. The MapTiler Team was privileged to present news from the OpenMapTiles project as well as advanced open-data use cases there.

Many innovative topics were presented at FOSS4G, and we could learn a lot about the open-source projects we are using such as GDAL, PROJ, PostGIS, OpenLayers and many others, old or new. We also appreciated several presentations about vector tiles and could sense the ever-growing interest in them. We were also very proud to be part of the presenters, with the two following talks:

OpenMapTiles: News, thematic layers, coordinate systems

Our first presentation by Petr focused on the OpenMapTiles project. This set of tools allows anyone to convert global geospatial data into pre-generated vector tiles, e.g., creating a map from the OpenStreetMap database. This project is developed and maintained by the MapTiler team and released under the BSD 3-Clause and the CC-BY 4.0 open source licenses.

See projects we built together with the amazing community at www.maptiler.com/opensource/ 

The latest updates from OpenMapTiles 3.10 were detailed, including new additions but also improvements provided to some layers such as boundaries, landuse or water. Peter also explained how it is now easy to create new thematic layers by extending the cartographic schema. He finally gave a few hints about generating vector tiles using custom coordinate systems.

Slides from Petr’s presentation are available on SlideShare.

Geospatial open data for everyone, from global to local

Nicolas presented about open geospatial data and how we gather and share it with the MapTiler technology. One of the highlights was about processing and combining various open data sources in order to provide ready-to-use tilesets and maps, which we are serving at scale.

Several examples and map styles were shown, all based on the MapTiler Maps API which blends OpenStreetMap with Wikidata (for named places translations) and Natural Earth (for landcover on higher zoom levels). Nicolas also presented the latest updates about MapTiler Satellite.

The slides are also available on SlideShare.

Thank you everyone and see you soon

We are very grateful to the Bucharest local organizing committee for their hard work, which led to a perfect organization and a great program. We also want to thank a thousand attendees for creating this friendly atmosphere which is unique to FOSS4G events.

Our next stop will be Heidelberg, Germany for the State of the Map conference, where we will present the progress of OpenMapTiles to the OpenStreetMap community. See you there or at the future regional and global FOSS4G conferences!

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Nicolas Bozon

Nicolas Bozon

Cartography Lead
Published on September 6th, 2019