LINZ Basemaps is a collection of tools to create and serve vector and raster basemaps using open source and open standards. It is designed to be light weight, cost efficient and fast.
Basemaps currently supports both Imagery and Vector data
Land Information New Zealand has a large archive of aerial and satellite imagery freely available from LINZ Data Service and the Registry of Open Data on AWS. This imagery was a primary driver for the creation of the LINZ Basemaps product and service. For more information on how LINZ acquires, ingests and publishes aerial and satellite imagery see linz/imagery.
While linz/basemaps is public, its primary reason is to work in the open, so that we can share knowledge and foster collaboration with peers across the world. While the LINZ Basemaps product and services can be customised and deployed we are primarily focused on our own use cases of sharing New Zealand's Aerial Imagery archive and Topographic vector data.
The core of the LINZ Basemaps Service consists of
- AWS S3 - COG Storage location
- AWS Lambda function - Tile Server - @basemaps/lambda-tiler
- AWS Cloudfront - Content distribution and tile cache
- linz/basemaps-config - Basemaps configuration
A tile request flows a number of basemaps packages:
Given a request /v1/tiles/aerial/WebMercatorQuad/6/1/40.webp,
Breaking down this request url lambda-tiler needs to serve a webp image that for the tile {z: 6, x: 1, y: 40} from the WebMercatorQuad tile matrix from the tile set named aerial in the default configuration.
Which will then utlize the following packages
- @basemaps/config - Load configuration (
?config) - @basemaps/lambda-tiler Convert tile XYZ into output coordinates bounding box
- @basemaps/lambda-tiler Determine which tiffs intersect the output coordinates
- @basemaps/tiler Determine which parts of the tiffs need to be loaded and resampled
- @basemaps/tiler-sharp - Load the bytes from the tiff and render it as a output image.
Imagery is stored as cloud optimised geotiffs by survey then layered together dynamically based on a configured priority order.
@basemaps/tiler takes the collection of tiffs and determines how resample (resize/crop) and paint them onto the output tile.
@basemaps/tiler-sharp uses sharp/libvips to take the output of @basemaps/tiler then load the raw tiff bytes and render them into output image.
Vector tiles are pre-rendered as Mapbox Vector Tiles and served directly from a Cloud Optimised Tar. Since there is no merging or dynamic configuration the tile server will just request the specified tile directly from the tar file.
To efficiently serve aerial imagery to huge number of consumers, it should be optimised into a format that makes it easy to serve. All of LINZ's imagery is stored as Cloud Optimised GeoTIFFs (COGs), and to ensure they are served as efficiently as possible some additional processing steps are generally pre-applied to the imagery.
- Reprojection: reprojecting the imagery into common consumption formats (EPSG:3857 and EPSG:2193) will greatly reduce the amount of load and complexity of the basemaps service service
- Tile Alignment: By aligning the COGs to the output XYZ tile grid
- Additional overviews: It is hard to fetch data from 1,000s of COGs to create a single tile, so we create additional overviews up to z0.
These additional processing steps are part of the basemaps import process and are controlled by @basemaps/cogify
The additional steps are optional but do greatly improve the tile serving performance of the service.
Vector data is processed from the LINZ topographic vector datasets using tippecanoe, this process is still a work in progress and will.
Deployments are handled by Github Actions see Deployments for more information.
All diagrams across this repository are created with excalidraw and embed the excalidraw configuration inside them, so can be re-edited on excalidraw