Regenerate OSM custom tilesets [incl hillshading & contours?]

[m-anish]

Experiment with having our own tileserver to do our own tilesets including hillshading and contours, for future deployments.

[holta]

@georgejhunt is helping @m-anish with Braddock's server here.

Refs: #877 #1170

[holta]

Context: we're trying to use vector tiles as much as possible — as described in http://FAQ.IIAB.IO here:

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/IIAB/FAQ#How_do_I_add_zoomable_maps_for_my_region.3F https://github.com/iiab/iiab-factory/blob/master/content/vector-tiles/README.md http://download.iiab.io/content/OSM/vector-tiles/ https://openmaptiles.com/downloads/

[holta]

fyi @georgejhunt is researching elegant tile generation — different approaches/algorithms to deliver vivid-yet-not-overcrowded vector tiles — building on his/our 2018 work ("How do I add zoomable maps for my region?").

This is related to #1192 from October 2018, but represents a much larger challenge around generating quality visualizations & illustration in general (Edward Tufte etc!)

Umbrella Ticket of OSM Priorities arising from 2018: https://github.com/iiab/iiab/issues/877#issuecomment-405935272

[holta]

@m-anish I'm deferring this hill-shading, contour line drawing & similar work to the IIAB 7.1 milestone, assuming it's not converging in coming weeks in time for IIAB 7.0?

(Or if I'm wrong, just LMK!)

[holta]

@mir123 warns that this might risk becoming a Sisyphean (overwhelmingly large) task that might bog us down — and never quite be completed well/sustainably.

Certainly: many/most OpenStreetMap offshoot/derivative projects use known tilesets like https://OpenMapTiles.org as there's a massive cost to reinventing the wheel, i.e. particularly when an huge/subtle/evolving ecosystem of scraping, packaging (and publishing if not archiving!) is at stake.

[mir123]

It is possible to generate your own tiles for sure, but it's indeed a significant undertaking, especially for large countries or subcontinent-size bounding boxes. I had success with using https://github.com/openmaptiles/openmaptiles, about 10 hours processing time for Central America and that's without hillshading and contours. I think this might be outside of the project's scope, but within the realm of the possible for those use cases that require up to date maps

[m-anish]

@m-anish I'm deferring this hill-shading, contour line drawing & similar work to the IIAB 7.1 milestone, assuming it's not converging in coming weeks in time for IIAB 7.0?

(Or if I'm wrong, just LMK!)

Right. Its not happening anytime soon. But it did happen in the past (I did it) and it will happen again in the future, but don't make time-bound plans around it. That's the best I can offer at the moment. Sorry.

[m-anish]

And, with help from the OSM community it took around a week using spinning hard disks to generate high res maps including contours and hillshade for India, so I think it's certainly worthwhile, especially in mountainous regions where maps without hillshade really dont mean anything.

[mir123]

Anish, do you know the procedure for generating the hillshades and contours and to include them in the mbtiles?

On Sun, 23 Jun 2019 at 05:18, Anish Mangal notifications@github.com wrote:

And, with help from the OSM community it took around a week using spinning hard disks to generate high res maps including contours and hillshade for India, so I think it's certainly worthwhile, especially in mountainous regions where maps without hillshade really dont mean anything.

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[m-anish]

I dont know how to do it in mbtiles, but I did know how to do it in metatiles. It needs time and lots of bandwidth and resources, but it is possible.