Peermaps – Decentralized Maps

peermaps.github.io

52 pointsIdeabile7 comments

Weird that it only mentions OSM in passing, in one or two places Seems like the source of your map data would be something you'd want to put out front

As an OSMer, I kind of took it as a compliment: "of course it's OSM... what else would you use?"

That was my interpretation as well, but not as an active OSMer.

I'm still trying to understand exactly what this is, and how it relates to OSM. Is it an alternative data set forked from OSM? A method of persisting OSM's data set in a torrent?

It's OSM maps without a backend. It will use webtorrent (torrents) to share the tile data.

Vector map tiles are a very intriguing technology given the latest tools from Mapzen, Mapbox etc., so sharing tiles over p2p is welcome. However, this seems to use a K-D-B-tree which is similar but different. Why? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-D-B-tree

Vector map tiles solve multiple problems in keeping the data transfers reasonable: independence from data outside of viewport, caching by tile, simplification by zoom level. Does this provide the same?

Free Vector map tiles : http://osm2vectortiles.org/downloads/

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