Raster tiles
Raster tiles are square bitmap graphics displayed in a grid arrangement to show a map. An alternative approach is vector tiling. The general concept of tiling and the difference between raster and vector tiles is described at Tiles.
This page includes lots of information and technical detail. If you want to use map tiles in your web page or application you can have a look at this tutorial about how to use OpenStreetMap tiles.
Graphical Map Tiles
Map tiles are typically 256×256 pixel images. e.g.:
Tiles are not always in these dimensions; for example there could be 64×64 pixel images, however 256×256 pixel images are a de facto standard. 512×512 pixel seems to be the usual size of high-resolution tiles.
A "tileset" typically includes enough tiles to form a very large image, if they were shown all at once, and also several zoom levels. Generally the idea is not to show them all at once, but to display a particular area of the map on a website. Normally this is done using a JavaScript map library to provide panning and zooming functionality, and request downloading of new tiles as necessary to show the user new areas of the map (a Slippy Map).
Using tiles
- Browsing#Layers explains the selection of tiles available for viewing on the openstreetmap.org homepage
- Mapnik – a popular tile renderer
- Kosmos Tile Map Server – windows tile renderer
- Tile usage policy
- Exporting calibrated maps list tools to have tiles compatible with specific embedding software
- Tiletool is a utility for map tile processing. It can generate lowzoom tiles combining higher zoom tiles, apply overlays over them and some other useful features.
Technical data
- Slippy map tilenames – calculate tilenames if you have coordinate
- Estimating Tile Disk Usage
- Tile water land status ([1]), index of which tiles are land, or water, on the OSM slippy map, this is a file available in SVN, in the png2tileinfo file.
Development
- mod_tile Apache module that spawns processes to render mapnik tiles. See OSM-Dev mailing list "mod_tile / renderd issue" (May 2008)
- Tile cache, renders maps with mapnik/mapserver/WMS and cache them as tiles.
- OSM Mobile Binary Protocol, tiled OSM data (see also WhereAmI/OSM Binary Format and the Talk mailing list thread "mobile binary data" from 2008)
Tile providers
Also see for example map compare service at bbbike.org. Please obey the usage restrictions of each tile server if you use it heavily!
More webservices to display different OSM based tiles are mapstyle.petschge.de and Leaflet Provider Demo.
Tiled map data
- QuadTiles, a scheme to make OSM database indexed by tiles
- OJW's tile data server, first implementation of a cacheable data server, that servs data in the same way as the tileserver.
- Tile data server, generic definition of how data served as tiles should work. (written by ojw as well...)
See also
Links
- Switch2OSM, The Basics This page gives some introductory information on the tiles, licence and JavaScript libraries to display the tiles.