OGC publishes Engineering Reports and Videos documenting successful Vector Tiles Pilot

Vector Tiles are an efficient way to package geographic data into roughly-square shaped 'tiles' with many benefits, including fast loading and flexible styling.

6 May 2019: The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is excited to announce that the Engineering Reports and demonstration videos documenting the outcomes and achievements of its Vector Tiles Pilot have been published and are freely available.

The Vector Tiles Pilot ran from July 2018 to February 2019 and aimed to advance an OGC approach to encode and publish Vector Tiles based on industry best practices, as well as propose extensions for existing OGC standards and emerging OGC APIs.

The Pilot demonstrated Vector Tiles as an efficient way to package geographic data into roughly-square shaped 'tiles' with the following benefits: faster loading of web maps; flexible styling with modern, easy-to-use tools; the capability to work online and offline with the same content; and the potential to simplify interoperability for command and control, consumer mapping, disaster relief, and many other applications.

In all, there are 6 Engineering Reports documenting the various outcomes of the Vector Tiles Pilot:

• Summary Engineering Report
• GeoPackage 1.2 Vector Tiles Extensions Engineering Report
• Tiled Feature Data Conceptual Model Engineering Report
• WMTS Vector Tiles Extension Engineering Report
• WFS 3.0 Vector Tiles Extension Engineering Report
• Vector Tiles Extension Engineering Report (focused on Styling)

The Engineering Reports are available for free from OGC’s Public Engineering Report Repository. Further information on the outcomes of the Vector Tiles Pilot, including videos and direct links to the engineering reports, is available on the OGC Vector Tiles Pilot web page.

Anyone interested in shaping the direction of future OGC Initiatives, such as the upcoming Testbed-16, is urged to contact techdesk@opengeospatial.org or submit an idea to OGC’s Innovation Program Ideas GitHub Repository.

About OGC

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is an international consortium of more than 525 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. OGC standards support interoperable solutions that ‘geo-enable’ the Web, wireless & location-based services, and mainstream IT. OGC standards empower technology developers to make location information and services accessible and useful within any application that needs to be location-aware. Visit OGC's website at www.opengeospatial.org.