Mapbox Vector Tiles Format

The text of this specification is licensed under a creative commons attribution 30 united states licensehowever the use of this spec in products and code is entirely free.

Mapbox vector tiles format. Mapbox streets our global basemap is entirely made of vector tiles. The specification details are largely structured around the rules implemented in the base proto file. Mapbox has developed an open source vector format to power the future of our web maps. Tiles must be in mapbox vector tile format.

Mbtiles is an open specification based on the sqlite database. Any map data you upload with mapbox studio is converted into vector tiles before styling. The mapbox vector tile specification defines a file format commonly used for serving vector data 25d incl. Vector tiles can be used as sources for styles or queried directly to create interactive experiences with the mapbox mobile sdks and mapbox gl js.

Data source tm2source and style tm2 necessary to create custom vector tiles protobuf encoded mvt mapbox vector tiles packed in mbtiles and shows what can be done with such tiles. This is an emerging method for delivering styled web maps combining certain benefits of pre rendered raster map tiles with vector map data. Vector tiles rethink web maps from the ground up providing a single efficient format to power raster tiles interactive features geojson streams mobile renderers and much more. Vector tiles are used to create mapbox vector tilesets.

All layers that use a vector source must specify a source layer value. Vector tiles are really small enabling global high resolution maps fast map loads and efficient caching. The id editor uses this mechanism to access osm source data. For vector tiles hosted by mapbox the url value should be of the form mapboxtilesetid.

The repo contains two mapbox studio classic projects. The openstreetmap api can also be used as an ad hoc vector tile source for osm xml data by creating appropriate bounding box queries. Vector tiles are encoded as google protobufs pbf which allow for serializing structured data. A specification for encoding tiled vector data.

For clarity mapbox vector tiles use the mvt file suffix. All geometric coordinates in vector tiles must be between 1 extent and extent 2 1 inclusive. There are no royalties restrictions or requirements. For example mapboxmapbox streets v8 is a single tileset that contains administrative boundaries road networks pois and other kinds of geospatial information from many different data sources.

A vector tile is a lightweight data format for storing geospatial vector data such as points lines and polygons.