Maplibre and Protomaps are a match made in heaven! Together they are democratizing vector maps! There’s no better time to get involved than now; let me set the scene first.

Maplibre SDK with Protomaps vector tiles, map at an angle with a video source playing drone footage video overlayed; data attribution (c) OpenStreetMaps and contributors

Maplibre is the open source map SDK forked from mapbox-gl-js when Mapbox changed their license and moved away from open source in 2020. Maplibre packages up around seven years of state of the art map renderer development and is best in class in terms of map rendering and styling vector tiles.

Protomaps is a relatively new project and it’s fundamentally changing how vector maps are distributed. Protomaps can package up the whole world into a single .pmtiles files of around 100 GB. Static hosting this single file gets us global vector tiles! Magic!

Why are the two projects such a good match? Maplibre offers an amazing map sdk and protomaps enables global vector tile data very efficiently and with little to no engineering. You can host a Protomaps file on your Raspberry Pi, you can put smaller extracts on Github Pages, you can static host them on a server, in the cloud, all with very little engineering required!

Check out what others have to say

• https://til.simonwillison.net/gis/pmtiles
• https://chaos.social/@simon@simonwillison.net/111288204157847759
• https://chaos.social/@fihu@norden.social/111317965336109687

In short: Maplibre and Protomaps are democratizing maps! Now’s the best time to get involved!

How to get involved

Over the last weeks I looked into Maplibre and Protomaps to see where we’re at. And while all the bits and pieces are there, it can be daunting to get started and understand how it all fits together.

While Protomaps is solving vector data distribution, for a map we usually also want

• fonts, we need font files in a specific format for maplibre
• sprites, for maplibre map icons
• terrain, for hillshading
• bathymetry, to style ocean depths

and this is where these projects could need a little bit of help in terms of documentation, examples, tutorials. If you want to get involved, now’s the best time, and I suggest spreading the word about Maplibre and Protomaps.

For custom icons and sprites I started writing down my experience

• https://github.com/maplibre/maplibre-gl-js/discussions/3243
• https://github.com/protomaps/basemaps/issues/160

For terrain there are recent terrain models freely available

• https://github.com/orgs/protomaps/discussions/5
• https://spacedata.copernicus.eu/collections/copernicus-digital-elevation-model

For landcover there is a Daylight distribution processing global landcover data

• https://github.com/protomaps/basemaps/issues/154
• https://daylightmap.org/2023/10/11/landcover.html

In terms of awareness, Maplibre and Protomaps could need some love, too!

Wiki: the wiki pages

• https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/MapLibre
• https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Protomaps

Get involved writing guides and tutorials! For example 3d markers for a map at an angle

Spread the word on mastodon, on mailing lists, in your local community!

Now’s the time to seize the means of map production! Let’s get started!

• Maplibre
• Protomaps