"Can you send me that as a shapefile?" First introduced in the '90s, it refuses to go away as the de-facto interchange format among casual GIS users, no matter how much we want to deprecate it. On the web, vector tiles have assumed that ubiquitous standard, with open and closed systems agreeing to implement it in the same way (mostly). What's more, integrations with desktop software has matured, and their convenience might be enough to convince people to prefer it. All this is possible without having to run servers or lock down your data to a specific platform.
Working in the humanitarian community, a lot of my field colleagues know just enough to be dangerous with GIS. A lot of them can put GPS points on a map, and a few of them can colour in admin boundaries. Encouraging greater utilization of data like this has been a mission of The Centre for Humanitarian Data, who also curates common operational datasets produced by the UN. In this talk, I'll focus on 3 types of users we targeted for more streamlined dissemination of this domain specific data: casual consumers, non-spatial analysts, and information managers.
From developing offline-enabled WebGL maps at fieldmaps.io, it became clear that vector tiles had huge potential for wider use. They might even be better for most people than traditional GIS file formats. Starting from the beginning, I'll cover how tiles are generated with tippecanoe and served from a directory with just style URLs and TileJSON. Going one step further, showing how to make these all work offline with service workers so people can access the data regardless of their connectivity.
Next, we have a large number of technical analysts developing dashboards with business intelligence software. For them, this is much more of a comfort zone than traditional GIS suites. Although most are proprietary systems, we don't need to cede control of our data. By just adding a few metadata files, they can consume and re-style our self-hosted tiles natively, preventing this distribution system from getting any more complicated.
Finally, among our most technical information managers, most are deeply invested in the ESRI platform. That doesn't mean we can't build bridges though. Although their tile implementation involves a few extra wrappers, it's still the same protocol buffer at the core. By peeling back these layers, you'll see how their vector tile service isn't much different than a style URL created with JSON. Extending into this ecosystem opens up a gateway to mixing with data already there in a seamless overlay.
With all the effort that goes into authoring tiles, there is so much that can be done with them. These user stories are just an example of everything possible, and hopefully, you come away with ideas for your own integrations.