Protocol Buffers

Protocol Buffers (Protobuf) is a data format developed by Google as a more efficient alternative to XML.

Protobuf is used by the following formats:

Format	Used file extensions
OSM PBF	.osm.pbf
Mapbox Vector Tile	.mvt (suggested by the specification) .pbf (used by the MapTiler API) .vector.pbf (used by the Mapbox tile servers)