Geo: Using the Mapbox SDK for Android

Thanks to you !!!
I am a bit "underwater" as we say in french this week. I will take some time in the coming days to document 2 or 3 use cases with vector data would be glad to see onto the map :slight_smile:

  • locate on a map the place we want to reach, for example a land parcel we own or a specie's location
  • describe a habitat polygon shown onto the map....

But if we talk about the data format, I think that the best is a the most easy to produce with GIS tools. I am not an expert, but I think that geojson and geopackage are now 2 classical GIS format in QGIS, maybe geojson is the most universal modern format between major GIS tools (free/non free). But file size will matter too... For the moment I never had to save vector data as mbtile and I even don't know how to do that.

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Hi all,

I'm pasting in some ideas from an email discussion on this very topic. I hope this will provide some insights into the technical discussion about file formats!


I'd emphasize MVT as the first priority to allow broad basemaps, with GeoJSON as the second priority to allow editable vectors.

Why?

MVT allows a very small file to provide a very broad, though static, map that is quite efficient and quick to render. Raster MBTiles are fine for viewing a static map, but the file size is many orders of magnitude greater for a given area; for example a detailed MVT map of all of Tanzania—containing all of the OSM data, therefore millions of buildings and most of the visible roads—is about 300MB, while a raster MBTile of only the capital city of Dar es Salaam could easily be 120GB. If deploying enumerators to visit rural areas, raster MBTiles are simply too heavy to contemplate in most cases, but MVT is small enough to fit on the vast majority of phones' storage. So implementing MVT basemaps immediately gets most enumerators an offline basemap of the area they are working in.

The drawback of MVT is that it's not a good format for on-device editing. A few reasons for this:

  • Each tile contains only the geometry within the tile itself. At a high zoom level this may be a tiny fragment of a road, or even a portion of a single building. Editing this means trying to keep track of the geometry of the whole feature, which is contained in the protobuf of multiple tiles (adjacent tiles and overlapping tiles of different zoom levels). That's a hassle.
  • The geometry does not have much notion of the attributes of the feature it's part of, so you need another file/database to keep track of object attributes. While you have the feature ID, you have to go back to another file to link that ID to the attributes that you may wish to deal with when editing.
  • The geometry within the protobuffers encapsulated in the MVT tiles is simplified; it may not (and in most cases probably doesn't) contain all of the nodes of the original feature! During creation of MVTiles, nodes are discarded to leave only enough to render the relevant parts of the feature as a visibly reasonable facsimile at the particular zoom level. When you extract a feature back out of MVT, you aren't guaranteed to get your original geometry back, though at the highest zoom levels you might (or at least it should be close). So editing would require, at a minimum, always drilling down to the highest-zoom tile, grabbing all of the adjacent tiles that contain relevant bits of the feature you want to edit, converting that to an editable representation (the internal MVT protobuffer representation is a crazy Logo Turtle-style language that would be hard to manipulate), and then replacing it in those tiles, as well as re-simplifying it to push it back into the lower-zoom tiles. Not a nice process at all, and even if you pull it off not guaranteed to retain all unedited nodes of the original feature.

This still leaves the question of styling MVT. There are various options for that, but I think the simplest is to have a default styling similar to the rendering done by OSMAnd, Maps.me, or the MapBox SDK, with an optional sidecar file specifying a custom styling using MapCSS or something like it.

Once MVT is done, we could theoretically implement OpenMapKit-style adding of attributes to polygons right away, just using the feature ID of the polygons in the MVT (no editing of actual geometry, but adding attributes in a form containing the feature ID). However, while it might be nice, I think that's a dead end because it'll never be smooth to access existing attributes or edit geometry. I'd just as soon head straight toward an extensible solution, which is an editable file for particular layers that are targets of the survey.

I could see lots of arguments for Shapefile or GeoPackage, but I think GeoJSON is the best option.

Shapefile is very compact and computationally efficient, but it truncates attribute headers/keys to 10 characters—you'll find a very common column name in GIS data is "descriptio" due to this truncation—this is particularly unfortunate for data like OpenStreetMap that often has quite long keys (i.e. building:construction which gets truncated to building:c, indistinguishable from the truncated building:commercial ). Shapefile is also a bit of a bear to parse due to the arcane ancient spec; there are some good libraries around, but the underlying machinery is pretty hairy. GeoPackage is lovely, reasonably efficient and compact, and is implemented on top of SQLite, which makes it a cinch on Android which has solid SQLite support. However, a lot of users will be intimidated by the requirements to create a GeoPackage. Not all data can be translated smoothly to GeoPackage, even for a moderately skilled GIS user (GeoPackage freaks out when confronted with topological errors or non-unique id columns, which unfortunately are often found in useful datasets).

GeoJSON is not very compact and not particularly computationally efficient, but it's really clear and straightforward in structure, easy to parse without relying on esoteric libraries, and easy to generate. Lots of Web people are familiar with GeoJSON, and there are tons of tools to generate it that aren't big scary GIS packages. Most data can be translated to GeoJSON without complaint, as the GeoJSON drivers don't care if you have topological errors or weird keys in your data (which would likely trip up a GeoPackage writer and maybe a Shapefile writer). It contains only one representation of any given feature, and can happily contain all attributes and metadata in the same file. As a generalist GIS format, it covers most uses reasonably without offering particularly high performance in any specific use.

So compared to an MVT (or Shapefile), a GeoJSON is large and inefficient for pure display purposes. You wouldn't want to put all of the OSM data for a city, or some equally large dataset, into it! However, you only need to put the layers you want to edit into the GeoJSON format, which in most cases vastly reduces the amount of data needed in that layer. And it's easy to create, style, edit, add/modify attributes to, and ingest after editing.

So my dream scenario is a three-layer cake, each layer being optional:

  • Raster MBTiles on the bottom for satellite imagery or other useful high-res stuff in specific areas
  • MVT in the middle, above the rasters, for a broad vector basemap, default styled with an optional sidecar file for styling
  • Editable GeoJSON on top for features that will actually be mapped and/or tagged.
    • Editable meaning the ability to:
      • Modify geometry using the GPS position
      • Modify geometry using fingers (long-press or cross-hairs, either way is fine)
      • Trigger a form to populate attributes
      • Trigger a form with existing attributes already pre-loaded for modification or not

However, that's my big ambitious dream scenario! I feel that just doing the MVT basemaps already adds a lot of value, which is not lost if the rest is not done (or takes a lot of time).

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Hi @Ivangayton,

Your dream scenario suits to me but for the moment what I do plan with such a feature is to first show vector homemade data over the map, to find it on the field, trigger a form to populates attributes, and maybe later to modify preloaded attributes...

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Hi @Marena,

Please forgive me if I've not understood this in your response, but are you saying that MapBox is happy for @zestyping and the ODK community to proceed with the use of the MapBox SDK, understanding that this may be for using their own custom vector tiles in some cases, without a MapBox account or token?

I think most of us are delighted to see the MapBox tiles as the default datasource, but as far as I understand the idea of using the MapBox SDK is not to have "the fall-back to OSMdroid" anymore for custom or user-specific vector tiles, but rather to fall back to the MapBox SDK without necessarily having an access token or using the MapBox online data to render such tiles.

This would mean that people forking ODK would end up with a version of the MapBox SDK, albeit without an access token for the MapBox data but able to render arbitrary vector tiles. At the moment @zestyping is doing this by using a blank access token; is this acceptable from MapBox's perspective? No one in this community wants to make use of the MapBox SDK in a way that MapBox isn't comfortable with, but there's a strong desire for the ODK app itself to be a fully functional stand-alone tool, even for people who for whatever reason might fork it and not have a MapBox account (without, of course, expecting to have free access to anyone's tiles or data, only to be able to use their own tiles and data).

There are a number of libraries that can render vector tiles, but I think the desire here is to use the MapBox SDK both as a way to access the MapBox tiles from the official Play Store ODK Collect app, but also as a standalone component to render tiles (and we can't help but notice that it's also capable of rendering GeoJSON, which makes it a rather strong candidate for the likely next step you've mentioned, which is interacting with user's own feature layers, which of course should not be dependent on an access token).

Sorry for the rather obsessive querying on these details; I think we really need to get this exactly right to ensure no one misunderstands or is sad later!

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Hi @mathieubossaert,

That's my most critical use-case as well! I can't wait to visit a building, road, tent, tree, or village in the field, click on it, and fill out the form triggered by it.

That said, I also can't wait to draw a new building and add a missing segment of road.

The only reason I suggest MVT first is because I'm pretty sure it's a quick win, and it'll probably be easier to implement interaction with features after we've got some kind of vector layer rendering.

I agree with you that GeoPackage and GeoJSON are the best options for user-generated layers; as I mentioned I lean toward GeoJSON to make it easier for non-GIS people. A person can use something like geojson.io to create a really basic layer without having any GIS knowledge or tools.

It may be that some sophisticated users want to put really detailed layers in, which could result in performance issues using GeoJSON. For this, GeoPackage would probably work better, but I suspect that such a benefit to users of heavy datasets won't be worth the added burden on those wishing to use light ones quickly and easily.

Maybe there's a chance that GeoPackage support could come later as an added functionality if a lot of us hit the limit of GeoJSON performance!

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Hi @Ivangayton - thank you for asking to confirm, it is good to be certain about these things!

I have confirmed with several colleagues today (thanks @langstonsmith) that yes, it is acceptable within Mapbox ToS to use the Mapbox SDK without a Mapbox token. The Mapbox SDK is open source, so if you develop with it in such a way that does not require a Mapbox token that is fine.

That approach does limit how much we can be involved and supportive (if the implementation starts to fork away from our SDK it is hard to guarantee what we can support). But we would not see that as a violation of our terms.

If the best situation for the ODK community is to use a version of the Mapbox SDK without a token, but in such a way that creates the option for people to more easily use Mapbox basemap tiles in cases where people want to, that's :+1: by us.

(Perhaps it would be a good idea to include info for developers that fork ODK that it contains a modified version of the Mapbox SDK - and that if developers want the full-featured, updated Mapbox SDK they should return to the source for that. I wouldn't want to see a developer thinking that they were using the full Mapbox SDK without realizing that it was a modified version.)

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Thank you so much, @Marena! That's wonderful news!

That's the confirmation we need to move ahead with this plan, and I feel much better knowing that it's okay with you and your colleagues at Mapbox. I really appreciate the time you've taken to do the extra checking into that.

It's certainly my intention to avoid forking the SDK for as long as we can—it makes everyone's life easier. Right now, there is no need to modify the SDK at all; we can achieve what we want using it exactly as is (just without an access token). To my thinking, the only situation in which it would really be necessary to fork the Mapbox SDK is if all four of the following are true:

  • Mapbox releases a new version of the SDK in which the current code path that allows a blank access token is removed.

  • In that new version, there is no other way to instantiate a MapView through public API calls.

  • We want to upgrade to using that version in ODK Collect because it does something great and new that we need.

  • We still want to use the Mapbox SDK for the fallback situation (as opposed to implementing the fallback with Google Maps or reintroducing OSMdroid or some other mapping SDK).

If we did ever fork the SDK, it would absolutely make sense to document that clearly and point developers back at the original Mapbox SDK.

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Thanks @Marena, indeed this is great news; many thanks to you and to your colleagues at MapBox.

Thanks for the clarity, and most of all thanks for creating and sharing such great software (the SDK), standards (the MVT format itself, as well as the other open formats Mapbox has created), and for giving us access to your tileservers and data.

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Thanks everyone, this is exciting all around! @Ivangayton makes a strong case for supporting MVT basemaps as a first step. And just so we're on the same page, we're actually talking about MVT MBTiles (Mapbox Vector Tiles stored within a SQLite container), right?

Here is a summary of what I think is going to happen in the short term:

  • @Marena and @yanokwa will coordinate in private to get the API key that Mapbox has generously offered into the build process with the documentation she describes in this comment.
  • @langstonsmith will finish his effort to get online Mapbox basemaps in Collect as described in Adding Mapbox vector tile basemaps - #36 by zestyping. This support will only work on the release build which will have the API key mentioned above. Alternately, those who fork can add their own API key as described in @Marena's documentation.
  • @zestyping will work off of the same branch and add support for offline vector mbtiles. This will work without requiring an API key.
  • I will be ready to code review as needed.

Did I get all that right?

@Marena, is there any way that you can restrict an API key to a specific Android app package name? I'm guessing probably not but thought I'd ask because that could make it very easy to use the special API key. It wouldn't need to be protected because it wouldn't work in any app but the officially released Collect. That's what Google has done (but of course they're entirely Android-centric).

As part of this work, I think it makes sense to rethink how users specify the various layers that should be shown, as @zestyping alluded to in his original post. Currently, there's a Mapping section in user interface settings with two preferences: Mapping SDK and Basemap. I'd like to propose that we remove "Mapping SDK" since that is not something a user should care about and instead have the following preferences:

  • Online basemap. Options will include the Google basemaps, OSM basemaps, Mapbox basemaps and none. If a selection is made here, that will determine which SDK is used behind the scenes.
  • Offline basemap. These can be rasters or vectors. If no online basemap was selected, the Mapbox SDK will be used. If a user selects a Google online basemap and a vector offline basemap, some kind of error message will be shown.
  • (Eventually) Editable vector layer (wording to be determined)

@Ivangayton, I'm particularly interested in your feedback on that proposal. Note that I'm suggesting one online basemap from a fixed list and one offline basemap that is user-specified.

We can start thinking about selectable and editable GeoJSON support in parallel but that will be considered a separate feature or more likely two (select may be a pretty low bar). Sample data files and desired behavior from @mathieubossaert and @Ivangayton will help guide that. No urgency so it will be quand @mathieubossaert pourra à nouveau respirer!

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A great teaser for promising new features !

Hey @LN, thanks for laying that all out so clearly!

It pretty much all matches what I've been thinking except for one adjustment: I'm working on taking @langstonsmith's last branch and getting the Mapbox implementation up to feature parity with the Google and OSMdroid implementations, so that it can be a complete replacement for OSMdroid. I've run into a few tricky bits with that, which I'm discussing with @langstonsmith over on the other forum post. These mostly have to do with the drawing and manipulating of markers (symbols) on the map; I've filed a few issues on the Mapbox Annotation plugin.

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Unfortunately there is no way to restrict an API key to a specific app @LN - we currently only have URL restricted tokens for web applications.

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Hi all, catching up on this thread as I’m interested and want to help bring this forward. Thanks for all the work @zestyping @LN.

And just so we're on the same page, we're actually talking about MVT MBTiles (Mapbox Vector Tiles stored within a SQLite container), right?

Yes, I think this is correct based on the convo above and direction. Many MVT tools either produce an mbtiles file or a directory of MVT files (.mvt or .pbf). For most of our work at HOT (what we’ve used externally or produced internally) relies on vector tiles stored in mbtiles in the pbf format with gzip compression.

I'm particularly interested in your feedback on that proposal. Note that I'm suggesting one online basemap from a fixed list and one offline basemap that is user-specified.

I think this is related to this point/feedback here but one factor is the use cases for how data is loaded onto the device.

Through our work with OpenMapKit, there have been two main workflows for getting data onto the phones. This is mostly just on the user-specified basemap:

  1. Through a download endpoint. Via OpenMapKit Server, ODK/OMK android users can point their app to the OMK Server endpoint and download the data they need for their survey (similar to the ODK Collect Get Blank Form) -- this data is an mbtiles file and an osm file. This isn’t always used in a low-bandwidth environment given data costs and bandwidth but is a workflow for connecting the data you need to a survey form that is currently used.
  2. Hand loading data onto the phone. The standard method of connecting the phone to the computer and uploading the files to the correct directory.
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Okay, the mbtiles file makes sense.

What about the osm file? Is that something that's necessary to support, or can we support only GeoJSON for the selectable-geometry layer and expect deployments to convert their osm files to GeoJSON?

I'm wondering if that conversion would involve data loss that makes it harder (or impossible) to make use of geometry edits.

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Hi @LN!

Please forgive me for over-explaining stuff I'm quite sure you already know; I'm not just answering you but hopefully laying out some of the details for other readers of the thread!

File format

Yes, I'm thinking of MBTiles files with protofuffer blobs in the tiles table. So yes, Mapbox Vector Tiles format in a SQLite container—these have a .mbtiles extension, and the blobs have a .pbf type. As per the spec here.

The online tile-server equivalent of vector tiles have a .../z/x/y.mvt name schema. That spec is here.

Layers

I agree that it would be good to change the way users specify layers (and that "Mapping SDK" probably doesn't mean much to the average field data collector and should be removed). However, I'd like to specify in a bit more detail what I'm thinking in terms of the choices and how I'd see them stacking into three discrete layers:

  • Bottom: Opaque base layer (offline opaque MBTiles or an online tileserver)
  • Middle: non-editable semi-transparent layer (offline Vector MBTiles or online MVT from a tileserver, perhaps even static GeoJSON)
  • Top: editable layer (GeoJSON or other, to be implemented later)

Base Layer

Sometimes an actual picture (raster) is the only thing you can get that allows you to see what's on the ground. When dealing with an unmapped area, a new refugee camp, or a newly-damaged area from a natural disaster, there's little chance that you'll have vectors representing the current features on the ground, but you might be able to get an aerial image, even quite soon after a natural disaster. So that capability should always be there (as it is now with OSMDroid, albeit with a few rough edges in the implementation).

It should be possible to make this an online or offline layer without much practical difference. The current online Google or OSM layers being used by OSMDroid are rasters (well, the OSM ones certainly are, and I think the Google ones are as well). Once the functionality for a given online raster layer is built, it's relatively straightforward to enable any online raster layer (here is an example of a general way to access image tiles from any online raster tile server—albeit in Python, but the math and URL manipulations are all the same).

Semi-Transparent Layer

This may be standalone, as opposed to overlaid on top of a vector layer. Standalone (and opaque) is the usual style of the vector tiles in the MapBox SDK; the vector tiles are simply a way to generate a map view locally from much less data-intensive vector geometry instead of downloading a bunch of images (which is what the current OSM layer in ODK does). However, a huge advantage of vector tiles is they can overlay an raster with transparency between features. So you can have a layer with, for example, a bunch of road traces, but also see the satellite/aerial imagery of the raster layer beneath. Really useful for incomplete maps; you can see what's been already mapped, but you can also see the raw imagery beneath what hasn't been done yet.

Vector tiles can be offline using the MBTiles format with tile type "pbf"
instead of JPEG or PNG. They can also be online, using (among other potential sources) the MapBox vector tile server that they're (very generously!) offering ODK (that's where the .../z/x/y.mvt schema comes in; instead of grabbing the tiles out of a SQLite container, the application grabs them from an HTTP tile address).

Editable Layer

This should, I propose, be on top and always render overlaying the raster or tiled-vector layers. That's simply because they're the thing the mapper is probably working on! Between features should, of course, be transparent.

Choices

Note that I'm only proposing one layer of each type for now. As much as it might be tempting to allow multiple vector tile layers so people can choose what they want to see on the map—and maybe that's a discussion for the future—if we initially only allow a single vector tile layer, this still allows the survey creator to give the mapper anything they choose. The vector tile layer can contain, or not, roads, buildings, fire hydrants, etc. So for the moment I don't see the need to allow stacking multiple discrete vector tile layers. One is enough.

I do think it's worth letting people decide for either of the two bottom layers whether they want offline or online. There's no reason not to allow someone to use a high-resolution offline drone image layer as their raster background for a specific area, while still having the online MapBox/OSM layer on top of it. Or, I suppose, vice versa; an online raster layer with an offline vector tile overlay (though I can't really think of a situation where that would be tremendously useful given the greater file size of rasters).

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Thanks for laying out all these details, @Ivangayton! Never hurts to have clearer information out in the open so that everybody is on the same page.

There's seems to be a pretty clear consensus that, as @LN suggested, the user-facing settings should not be focused on a developer-facing concept like the choice of SDK.

I also think having three layers makes sense. @LN's proposal is a shift from internal implementation details toward user concepts, and I see @Ivangayton's proposal as a further step in that direction.

Let's present the layers in terms of the purpose they're used for; that makes sense. I'll try to propose some user-facing terminology, then:

  1. Base layer: A fully opaque layer. Could be a map with authoritative or general-purpose information; could be satellite or aerial imagery. Because the layer is fully opaque, it only makes sense to have one of these. (I'm suggesting "base layer" rather than "base map" so there's no confusion about what a "map" is: there are 3 layers and they go together to make a map.)

  2. Reference layer: An optional layer of additional information that is more specific to the task at hand, mostly transparent, drawn on top of the base layer. The purpose of the layer is to help you find your way around or to provide related information, but it is not the thing you are manipulating or collecting data about; hence the name "reference".

  3. Content layer: An optional layer of geometry drawn on top of the reference layer. The name "content" is intended to imply that this is the geometry you are working with—either you're collecting data about it, or you're editing the geometry.

You wouldn't be restricted to online, or offline, or vector, or raster, in any particular position among these layers—with the one exception that the content layer must be a vector layer.

So the ultimate list of supported formats would look like this:

  1. Base layer:

    • OSM online raster tiles
    • Mapbox online vector base map
    • Google Maps online vector base map
    • Any offline mbtiles file (raster or vector)
    • Any online mbtiles file (specify a URL)
    • Any online raster tile service (specify a URL template)
    • Any online vector tile service (specify a URL template)
  2. Reference layer:

    • Any offline mbtiles file (raster or vector)
    • Any online mbtiles file (specify a URL)
    • Any online raster tile service (specify a URL template)
    • Any online vector tile service (specify a URL template)
    • GeoJSON
  3. Content layer:

    • GeoJSON

From a user perspective, my question is: Would this make sense to users? My hypothesis is that presenting it this way, and minimizing the restrictions on which formats are allowed in each slot, means less extra stuff that users will need to understand.

From an implementation perspective:

  • The "specify a URL" options are not ones we've really been talking about so far. I would prefer to do them as part of a second round; they are only listed for completeness.
  • Although this does allow a wider range of possibilities than the proposals mentioned previously, I don't think it's actually harder to do with the Mapbox SDK. We'd be supporting the same set of formats and facing the same issues; all that's new is the possibility of two sets of raster tiles or two sets of vector tiles, which is not any harder than one set of each.
  • If Google is selected for the base layer, then the other layers are disabled. Or maybe we allow semitransparent raster tiles, but that's all.

Thoughts on this?

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On the contrary, I so appreciate the thoroughness of your response! It's all hugely helpful to have laid out so clearly. I wasn't so sure about the functional distinction between the two bottom layers and your explanation clears that up.

@zestyping, I really like what you're proposing. I'm a little unsure about the "Reference layer" term because I had to read your description to understand where the name comes from but I can't come up with a better alternative right now.

Agreed.

I agree and also agreed with the use cases and ideas around the base and semi-transparent layers from @Ivangayton. Just to add though on the user side, I almost think of the reference and base layer as one. Your base layer could include satellite imagery but also the semi-transparent road or boundary information. This might not change the implementation of how there are "layers" but might simplify on the user side to think about what do I want to show as the map versus what do I want to edit.

Thanks @zestyping. This was just the use case for the OMK app to download an OSM file onto the phone for editing. But I don't think it's something that necessarily needs to be supported right now. That OSM file was just an XML file and so I think focusing support on geojson only probably makes sense for now. And I don't think the conversion will involve any data loss or make it harder to use. :+1:

One clarifying question around how a user thinks about the layers:

@zestyping - are you saying that the content layer needs to be defined as a separate layer (and either have data loaded, or create data from scratch)? My question for this is around the use case of wanting to just bring a single vector data source onto the phone that can be used for the base map but also then edited. I think I understand the need for a content layer from a user perspective, but it seems like we're requiring users to duplicate the data we need to get on the phone. A use case here is that the same vector layer you use for your base map (or reference layer) is the same layer you want to use as your content layer.

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@zestyping - are you saying that the content layer needs to be defined as a separate layer (and either have data loaded, or create data from scratch)?

Yes, that was what I had in mind.

It never occurred to me that you might want to use one vector layer as your base layer and also edit that layer. I assumed that one would always want to have at least some kind of (non-editable) base or reference information under the geometry being edited (if there's nothing under it to refer to, how would you know where to move the vertices?)

Could I trouble you to walk me through an example of a situation where one would want to do that?

Would it satisfy this use case if you could choose "none" for the base layer and "none" for the reference layer, and have only a content layer showing?

Thanks!

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Hi @smit1678,

I think one big reason to separate the Reference and (editable) Content layers that they will usually have different requirements and uses. It'll usually make sense to use different file formats for the two.

Requirements for each layer

We'll often want a large Reference layer with lots of stuff in it (i.e. the entire OSM feature set for a given area of interest, with a generous buffer around it).

The Content layer that an individual enumerator is editing will usually be much smaller. Perhaps it'll be a small part of the overall AOI, and perhaps it'll be only a single feature type (for example just the buildings), but there will be relatively few cases where someone is sent out into the field with a mandate to edit everything in a large area.

So generally the Reference layer requires compact file size and efficient loading, but not editability, while Content layer requires straightforward editability, but is likely to be a smaller dataset/file.

Implementation choices for each layer

MVT MBTiles will shine for the Reference layer; they are small, compact, locally rendered, and efficient. However, they are a horrible choice for editing (for lots of reasons I alluded to in my long post above).

For the Content layer, GeoJSON is a great choice because it's very straightforward to edit. However, we don't want to try loading an entire basemap of a large area in GeoJSON; even if the file size is manageable, the loading/rendering speed will be terrible (because there's no internal tiling; the whole file has to be loaded to display any part of it or any low-zoom rendering).

To sum up: I think in the vast majority of cases users will be better served by a large, fast Reference layer and a smaller, easily edited Content layer, probably consisting of vector tiles and GeoJSON respectively (maybe GeoPackage as another option later; that'll be more compact and higher-performance than GeoJSON, just harder for non-GIS users to generate).

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