In early June this year Intellias company hosted the second “Map Solutions” conference in Kyiv. A brief overview can be found here. Today we will take a closer look at the speech of Vladimir Agafonkin, a well-known developer of the Leaflet library. Quoting his LinkedIn profile, Vladimir is a lead JavaScript Engineer at Mapbox, an “open source and open web standards enthusiast and one of the leaders in online maps industry”. He has developed numerous web applications and services, designed, created and maintained JavaScript libraries and APIs.
Vladimir kindly commented on certain parts of his presentation, helping us understand the major trends and novelties of the Mapbox graphics platform.
Volodymyr Agafonkin
Since 2010 Mapbox has rapidly occupied the niche for creating and updating custom online maps. At present open libraries and cartographic applications are a good alternative to the existing cartographic providers, such as Google Maps. Mapbox uses open source data, e.g. from OpenStreenMap or NASA and also their own, from DigitalGlobe.
In his presentation “Mapbox GL. How vector maps work”, Volodymyr notes that vector maps belong to the third era of interactive cartography. This is what Mapbox team and the speaker himself are involved in at the moment. This type of cartographic data display has been widely used by various companies such as Google, Apple, Here for a while, and is a relatively new service of Yandex Maps, that have switched to the vector format recently.
Mapbox GL JS is a JavaScript library that renders interactive maps from vector tiles and Mapbox styles. As far as the service goes, Mapbox development team can currently boast a smooth map zoom and rotation. There are no visible leaps in changing fonts while “zooming”, front style is not set by specific pixel values but by using interpolation corresponding to functions between scales. Thus maximum smoothness in image rendering is achieved when working with the map. While we can use a raster image only as a base layer, vector maps provide complete control over the image in real time at 60 frames per second. Additional features allow you to add and take away the captions, change the color, width of objects, and (that is quite unusual) set the day or night mode when rendering the maps. When changing map rotation, for example for the surface with mountainous terrain, light source remains in the upper left corner, which facilitates the possibility of orienteering.
Another advantage of the graphics platform is the ability to use visual editor for making any object on the map interactive. Similarly to Photoshop or another program of the same purpose, when selecting a specific object, you can change a number of its properties, move layers, change map style etc. A big advantage of this editor is that there is no need to write additional code to work with the interactive map.
We have asked more about the new features of the graphics platform the man who was directly involved in its development.
Antonina Kostruba:
We all understand how economical using vector format is when working with visual cartographic information compared to the raster format. But what are the downsides of using vector maps and are they connected to the software type or capacity of the computer?
Vladimir Agafonkin:
Yes. The main disadvantage of the work with vector maps, unlike the conventional pictures, is the requirement of powerful resources for the work. hey will work badly on the old computers with poor video cards and they will not work at all in old browsers. Fortunately, technical progress moves at a frantic pace and now even mobile phones have enough capacity for displaying vector maps correctly, not only in applications, but even in web-browsers.
A.K.:
One of the novelties of Mapbox GL is the playback capability of videos captured by drones linked to the terrain. How does this function work exactly?
V.A.:
Video can be linked to the terrain (for example, a drone captured video) at specific coordinates, making that part of the map interactive. Here is an example.
A.K.:
Can a user with no skills in writing code link video to the map? And what kind of formats does this platform support?
V.A.:
In order to understand the code, it is necessary to have a little practice, although it is not very complicated. But in future it will be possible with help of visual Mapbox Studio. This platform supports the same formats as in HTML5 Video: WebM, VP8, VP9, Ogg Theora, H.264.
A.K.:
The graphic library which Mapbox is working on is accessible for work on computers and mobile platforms. What about embedded applications for cars? Will it work there?
V.A.:
Yes. The process of application embedding is one of our goals for Mapbox Platform. For more on this topic read here.
San Francisco road coverage, made in Mapbox GL
A.K.:
How serious of a competition can it make for already known brands that deal with maps for car navigation systems? Why is your product unique?
V.A.:
Competition is serious. Mapbox maps are more flexible in settings, it is possible to change absolutely all display aspects and they work faster than analogs do; the whole code for the maps is open source, what makes it more clear and it is easier to correct mistakes. Our maps are cheaper than those competitors offer. I think time than our maps become standard in well-known car brands is quickly approaching.
A.K.:
There is another additional function of this graphic platform: creating maps in a perspective view and with 3D possibilities. According to your presentation, the feature of constructing 3D buildings will not only be active for the web browser, but for mobile applications too. So how will it work?
V.A.:
3D-buildings will come up as new “rendering” named “extraction”, size and color of which can be edited as all other attributes. For example, that is what the function of displaying population density combined with 3G capabilities looks like. Eventually there will be a possibility to create and visually edit such requests in Mapbox Studio.
Density level of urban population, modeled in MapBox Studio
A.K.:
Volodymyr, please tell us which additional capabilities in the field of interactive maps you and Mapbox team are working on now?
V.A.:
One of the main innovations which we work on are so-called data-driven maps, that allow linking map style with the properties of objects. For example, set the width and color of the road, as a function of the car speed on it. We understand data-driven maps as the ability to change any display property based on any of the object properties, and it is done dynamically. For example, change the map display depending on the light sensor data in the car.
A.K.:
During three years’ work on Mapbox GL you have faced the challenges of rapid and high-quality display of the graphic information (including triangulation problem, “zoom” of the textual information, that you’ve mentioned in the presentation), downloading and processing that information, archiving and storing large data etc. Which issues have been left without a solution? With what else do you have to work on?
V.A.:
That is the 3D-landscape. We will have a lot of work with it, but for now we are focused on the other functions that are under development. But, we will get to the 3D-terrain sooner or later.
A.K.:
What will be the next step in the digital maps development in your opinion? If now the optimal way for working with them is vector format and cloud storage of information, so what will be next?
V.A.:
I think that the next step will not only be in the displaying technologies and map storage, but rather in the tools for creating them. The tools become more available for wider public and maps become more important in the world of information systems. That is why designers and developers will play a growing role in the map creation, not GIS-specialists.
A.K.:
Moving away from the topic of Mapbox GL and its novelties, readers would like to know more about your independent projects. So, please tell me about your cooperation with Maps for HTML Community Group.
V.A.:
I was invited to this GitHub group as an expert, to take part (when I have an opportunity) in discussing the concept and implementation of the project into life. But currently I have not delved deeply into their work. I was not very impressed by the idea of standardized components of Web maps for HTML. Development of interactive maps is going too fast to try to “freeze” a condition in any standard, as it will inevitably expire at the time of its own adoption.
A.K.:
Finally, I can’t help asking you about the LeafLet library. Internet sources say that the latest version was released in late 2013. What will happen in future with our favorite library? Do you plan to improve and expand it?
V.A.:
Leaflet 1.0.0 version is about to come out: rc1 came out couple of months ago, rc2 will be released this week, and the final version will come soon enough. It will contain a lot of improvements and changes in the current version.
Actually, it should be noted that Leaflet is currently a very developed library and there is no urgent need in “big” new versions, since support in the form of small updates and fixes is enough (last update 0.7.7, came out in late 2015). Main principle of Leaflet – it needs to stay easy, simple and quick to use. To keep things simple in the main library, all new capabilities appear as plug-ins which already count over two hundred.
Ed.: Leaflet 1.0.0 has already been released.
A.K.:
To summarize, I would like to add, we understand that in the field of interactive maps Mapbox is working hard right now, the accessibility of its products is especially important as well as those new possibilities it gives to GIS-specialists and amateurs working with cartography. Vladimir, we are really grateful for your work in developing of this open source platform, and thank you for answering our questions.
V.A.:
Thanks! I strongly advise to subscribe to our blog, where we publish a lot of interesting articles about mapping technologies every day.
