Hi all, Paul from Humanitarian OpenStreetMap team (HOT) here. Access to and interfaces for using vector tiles sounds like a great feature to have! For accessibility and ease of use, having a default Mapbox tiles option would be a great place to start.
I think that ideally, integrating vector tiles would contribute to, and work towards more effective geospatial data collection in ODK across the board, and not be a parallel effort limited to use as a 'plain' basemap. I fully understand there are tradeoffs involved on Mapbox's end, but some of the complications/limitations I see are that Mapbox tiles limit the features they contain and expose, it'll probably be complicated to access to underlying OSM id's (and might lack the ability to attach extra data/attributes from form questions), and that portablity is potentially limited.
Some questions/suggestions from my end (these do mirror @LN, @yanokwa, and @danbjoseph's to some extent):
- Would it be feasible to define a "map view" that can use configurable vector and raster sources? And could we define a vector tile interface, for which Mapbox is one of the (default) providers? For example, for cases where the Mapbox tiles don't suffice, we could then also have the option to package vector tile data for deployments, or set up vector tile endpoints containing a specific AOI and data types we need (say, all WaSH facilities + attributes we need for those).
- As @Marena indicated, it would be awesome if the vector tiles would be stylable via MapCSS, or another (portable/standardized) format!
- As @danbjoseph requested, designing to allow offline usage would be a major benefit. ODK is used by many humanitarian organizations in low (or non-existant) bandwidth environments. Caching is one thing, but requires those specific devices to be connected at some point. In a lot of our projects we need to be able to package and preload all map data in advance (aerial and raster basemaps as mbtiles, editable map data as .osm) before embarking.
- What options do you see if we were not just to think about displaying basemaps, but also enhancing editing and geospatial data collection? Would that somehow be feasible on vector tiles? What (standard) file formats would be the most suitable for that? OpenMapKit has been using .osm xml, but I'd like to see us move towards open (OGC) formats if possible, like GeoPackage. Thoughts?