Creating Vector Tiles from Scratch using TypeScript

I currently work at a Japanese mapping startup called Geolonia. We specialize in customizing and displaying geospatial data, and a big part of this is making vector tiles. There are a lot of ways to do this, the most popular being tippecanoe from Mapbox, ST_AsMVT in PostGIS, OpenMapTiles, and tilemaker. We normally use tippecanoe to convert GeoJSON data to vector tiles and tilemaker to generate OpenStreetMap-based tiles, but there isn’t really an easy way to generate arbitrary vector tiles in plain old TypeScript / JavaScript.

Serving real-time, tiled, point data directly from DynamoDB part 2 - the plan

February 27, 2022

I previously wrote about something I wanted to do with DynamoDB and geospatial data, and got a lot of responses on Twitter. In the end, I think I’m going to go with a hybrid approach – using Uber’s H3 geocoding algorithm to generate clusters and to take care of indexing points, and then generating vector tiles as a separate process based on that data. Here’s a bird’s-eye view of how the data will flow.

Serving real-time, tiled, point data directly from DynamoDB

February 23, 2022

Recently, I’ve been interested in how to serve and work with geographic data with the least amount of “work” possible. Everything here can be done pretty easily with PostGIS and a large enough server, but I’m always up for the challenge of doing things in a slightly different way. I’m working on an app that will store lots of points around the world – points that people have submitted. Users will open this app, and be presented with a map with points that have been submitted in their vicinity.