Stadia x Stamen: A New Era for Stamen Map Tiles
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:00
I mean, I think you just gave my talk for me so we can be done, right? So I'm Luke founder and CEO of stadia maps and I am here to share what's probably my favorite project of the eight years of stadia maps like Ilya was saying I knew about stamen maps long before I started stadia maps and Their base tiles were all throughout my projects before I had a company and the chance to bring that into our platform
00:26
Was really really cool. So just a little bit about stamen They are a design firm primarily focused on data and cartography They've been around for almost 25 years and pretty much if you have used open street map tiles in
00:43
A commercial setting anywhere stamens fingerprints are somewhere on that If you look at a lot of the map styles from the last 20 years dealing with open street map. They've had a very significant Influence on that I even looked at some of our own styles. I realize they originally stem from stamen
01:01
work many many years ago Stadia maps we do location api's for developers. We help companies put location in their product Especially companies that are not geospatial focused We focus on being private affordable and give a human touch to support so you can get the job done without too much hassle
01:21
so the stamen map tiles The they're really composed of three styles three style families actually within these families There's a lot of different variants most people have seen watercolor and don't know what it is, but really like it and Then there's kind of more traditional map cartography in
01:42
toner and terrain They were created more than 10 years ago At the behest of the Knight Foundation, which is a nonprofit focused on creating tools for journalists to create good journalism, so they're actually have a history in being used as tools for
02:03
newspapers particularly in digital media but one really cool thing that's happened since then is because water cooler watercolor is such a fantastic map Art piece is actually now part of this Smithsonian Design Museum in New York, and I had a chance to see that
02:23
And it's really cool to see a map full screen on the wall that you get to interact with It's something that I've never seen of one of my own maps So it was a problem everyone loved the stamen base maps why change It really came down to a few things primarily cost
02:43
stamen base maps were free for 10 years, and I don't know how many of you run a tile service But the costs add up really really quickly they were spending thousands of dollars a month just to maintain this free service and Had no way to make any money from it and at some point the budget just wasn't there anymore
03:04
Then when you look at some of the styles there were a lot of missing tiles Actually all the styles were there were missing tiles on their service and the data was old So we're talking this is open street map data for maybe 2014 2015 And if any of you have looked at the changes in between in the last 10 years of open street map
03:21
There's a lot more data. It's a lot better and It just wasn't reflected in the stamen tiles and at the end of the day they needed to turn the service off But they didn't want it to go Just go away. So that's where we come in. They approached us last year and wanted to see What we could do together and because we're all about open source and open data
03:46
We work together to create the brand new stamen map styles This is actually just we only Recreated toner and terrain because watercolor is impossible to recreate in current modern map rendering stacks
04:00
And I actually have a little bit about that later Pretty typical Open data sources OSM natural earth The EU lane covers built in and because it's a stamen style. There's no island somewhere in there Again, most of you know the the software already Open map tiles is the the style schema
04:22
We've used for a long time map Libre the map rendering and then lots of things that we added as glue pieces to make it work The styles themselves are open license. You can use them yourself for non-commercial projects and Eventually those will be fully open license. So anyone can use them for any purpose
04:45
so I want to talk a little bit about the challenges and Success of the project first, it seems like a very technical project and there were technical challenges and of course cartographic challenges but some of the biggest challenges were actually organizational things like how do we Talk about this to a developer community that's formed over the last 10 years
05:06
so When you have something for free on the internet it gets used and when it gets used for 10 years everyone knows about them and everyone uses them and There were
05:21
probably millions of users of the same and base maps in the last 10-15 years and These users were just using a URL. We didn't know their emails. We didn't know anything about them so the first thing we had to do is how in the world do we tell all these people that things are Changing and then on top of that we have to tell them sorry
05:43
but this free thing is now going to cost you a little bit of money and This is a huge number of projects it's not just one with millions of users It's probably thousands of projects with a few hundred users each or even more
06:01
So pretty early on we realized the biggest challenge here is not going to be the technical recreation of the map It's actually going to be telling everyone it's changing so we started really early on I think probably Three or four months before any change was coming we started publishing blog posts We started talking about it everywhere we could so that hopefully people would
06:22
Discover what was going on We also came up with this cool idea of replacing the tiles with what we called our Brown out tiles so as we started the transition after we had done the cartography work Every other tile would start being replaced or every 16th tile would be replaced with this little
06:43
Filled tile that said this is what's happening go to this website to find out more So anyone who was using the maps would slowly find out things are happening and we changed that from like every 16th tile to every 8th tile to every second tile and eventually the entire map was just this brown out tile to tell people things are changing and
07:03
That actually works surprisingly well people eventually found out my map is broken and Most of the users that could transition did Technical challenges were many
07:21
Like I said this has been around for 10 15 years so a lot of people were using them So we're talking thousands of tile requests every second and we needed a way to handle this influx while we were doing it It's not actually three styles Like I said, it's actually about ten separate styles and we wanted to support all of those and if any of you have dealt with
07:41
raster Rendering of maps that means for every single style Variant you have to render something else. So it gets really complicated really fast to keep the caches warm and things like that and Unfortunately a technical decision was made many years ago when they added support for HTTPS
08:01
They actually used a domain that was not controlled by stamen so we could automatically handle the non secure traffic the insecure traffic, but when the secure traffic hit The Tile endpoints that they were using it was actually a fastly controlled domain So there was no way for us to cleanly transition those tiles without continuing to pay path fastly for at least a CDN provider
08:26
Continue paying them for every single request We could make it a redirect request, but we still had to pay for the redirect request so we ended up having to just turn those URLs off and we think that most of the users we lost was Actually because those tiles just went away and there was no way for us to tell tell them that the tiles were moving
08:46
a Fun technical challenge in the terrain style especially was there's lots of data that goes into it. There's the base map data streets Cities, etc. There's lots of land cover information you needs That's where the EU land cover data set came in and then you also it included hill shading. So we had to include
09:08
Elevation data and we ended up having a lot of fun making our tile server do that really efficiently and It ended up working quite well
09:20
Lots of traffic if you can see down here at the bottom when we should turned on the redirect from stamen map tiles to our Like the old base maps to our implementation of the base maps because that's how we started We ended up almost doubling tile traffic instantly and And that was a fun night
09:40
But I think it actually worked pretty well. I don't remember any error spikes or anything. So that was fun Like I said terrain needed all kinds of data inputs and we had to solve that Including no Island which is a fun stamen Easter egg Which for the technical among us we ended up solving this by using an MB tiles locally
10:04
So there's a MB tiles file with a single tile just for no Island in all the stamen tile sets a Few Cartographic challenges came along definitely less than the other ones Map Libre as a renderer is quite nice to use a stamen was very comfortable using that style language
10:25
But we did run across a few things And I'll talk a little bit more about the land cover in a second Fonts were a surprising thing They had really originally used Helvetica in the toner styles and font licensing is impossible
10:43
You go to a font licensing website and you ask for how can I get a license for? I don't know how many users in a map and they usually just look at you and say What is this? So we ended up finding a free font we could use And of course transitioning an old styled with old data schema to a brand new one
11:03
and they meant stamen had to go through and find a lot of Just changes and understanding what data is there and what isn't and how has it changed? And so there's a lot of work especially at the end to to reclassify things and give it the same look and feel But when you actually look at the before and after it ends up being very very similar
11:22
Which I think is a testament to the modern rendering stack and How good it is So like I said land cover was really tricky This were particularly tricky because at the lower zoom levels when you're zoomed out. We're using the EU land cover data
11:41
Which and then when you zoom in we're using open street map land cover data And when you look at the two tiles two data sets, they actually don't overlap one to one So you have to figure out how in the world do we merge these two? And create a good look and feel The original had way less land cover as you can see here on the right and
12:02
On the early draft. There was way too much land cover So we ended up finding a way to like mess with Transparency and find a really good seamless result as you zoom in and switch between the two land cover data sets Just another example of the same problem how it
12:20
Had to be solved across the the u.s. There and like I said stamen loved Helvetica But Ironically discovered they thought they were using Helvetica for this tile set the entire time, but they weren't they were actually using aerial
12:41
So we ended up deciding the font doesn't actually matter It's really just a state of mind so we can use enter which looks surprisingly similar and as you can see We can't even tell which is which unless you know So what you really came here for the before and after run through these
13:00
images quickly And as you can see overall Things really maintained a similar look and feel we don't feel like we lost too much in The transition and in some ways there was gained fidelity because vector tiles can render a lot better on retina displays And you can see even in some of these images the the additional clarity that you didn't have before
13:26
Toner I believe that's somewhere in London and you can see even here in this image the advance of open street map data You're starting to get building footprints in places that never were ten years ago and even the road network itself is is better maintained
13:41
Lower Manhattan So that's what we were able to accomplish This took about I think two or three months of work between the organizational and cartographic work and implementations on our side But the one thing we left out was watercolor
14:02
Like I said, you can't do that with the current vector map rendering But there's been a little bit of movement For those of you who follow map Libre. There's a company that works with us a lot on the native side that Has a few ideas of how we could do watercolor
14:20
Rendering inside of map Libre and we're really excited to see if that's possible We'd love to recreate watercolor because the the current style we host is still the old data from ten years ago And there's lots of missing tiles If you go to the talk Page there's actually the link to this blog post where it talks about how we could integrate
14:41
Photoshop level image processing in map Libre to create map Libre style and I personally would love to see that We would love to continue iterating on the the technical and cartographic Styles, this is not an end state. We want to keep working on it
15:01
And then use statements insights to improve our own data schemas and our own product So that's it. Thank you all. So any hands
15:21
Thanks a lot for the presentation first. I'm a fan of watercolor here just Wondering what is the EU global and cover exactly city urban Atlas? Is it Korean and cover and how did you? Use it outside Europe, but that was not clear if you only relied on OpenStreetMap or you you did something in between
15:41
So the EU land cover what we're using is that there's a product produced from sentinel data called world cover and it's I think it's Ten or a hundred meter resolution land cover classification for the globe So we took that we processed it turned it into vector data and use that as the basis for land cover
16:01
We end up reclassifying quite a few of the covers because they they get quite detailed, but that's that's where that's from Yeah, it's global and it's it's freely licensed Like look as far as I know My Tyler provides like satellite imagery in tiles. Do you know how that works? Can that help?
16:28
So watercolor is you're asking about watercolor, right? Yeah, I mean like I saw satellite imagery being packaged into vector tiles, does it work
16:40
I've never seen that particular thing. But basically what happened
17:01
Can somehow have the functionalities of Photoshop then I think we are up for something really good You actually have to render different layers completely separately run them through Filters and then stack that together
17:20
So what you end up is with like a intermediate like you use the vector data to create an intermediate set of raster layers Process them off screen and then layer them together I mean if you look at the original stamen code, it also does a lot of post-processing of textures and things like that so
17:42
A quick comment about the work hours. So there has been a lot of discussions a lot of Desire to have this functionality, but we're basically missing two key components Funding and volunteers. So if you can find Someone around you who can either do the technical work or who has too much money in their pockets
18:05
Do let us know we'll take both and we'll get We will be very happy to accept any kind of code and or financial donations in this Because I mean it's clearly needed It has a lot of really hard problems to solve in terms of technical difficulties
18:24
Because I mean performance you can you can imagine how much performance would collapse because of this kind of functionality So it has to be done very carefully not to sacrifice performance Let's get it done And I know that stamen would love to recreate this in a modern stack and we would do so
18:45
So did this transition bring additional revenue or is just venti project? Yes