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radiantearth / stac-browser

A full-fledged UI in Vue for browsing and searching static STAC catalogs and STAC APIs
https://radiantearth.github.io/stac-browser
ISC License
282 stars 140 forks source link

Basemap vector tile support #506

Open wiesehahn opened 2 days ago

wiesehahn commented 2 days ago

Hey, I know the project is currently not funded, so this is just a feature request for discussion.

As basemaps in the map viewer there are currently only raster tiles (XYZ, WMS) via leaflet supported. However the web is more and more geared towards vector tiles which have a lot of advantages (client side rendering, smooth zoom, etc.). Since this year there is open vector tiles via https://openfreemap.org and very recently via osm directly, also some national authorities provide them (e.g. https://basemap.de/).

The natural library to provide good support for vector tile basemaps would be Maplibre GL JS. In the upcoming 5.0 release there will also be a globe projection which might be a good option to vizualize stac catalog extents as well.

Are there any thoughts already about supporting vector tile basemaps and/or switching to maplibre gl js?

m-mohr commented 1 day ago

It is planned to switch to OpenLayers and ol-stac next year. I'm not sure right now whether OL supports vector tile basemaps, but if it does we could support it.

I don't plan to support multiple mapping libraries in STAC Browser.