Documentation

New technology

The increasing performance of clients and growing bandwidths enable the use of new web technologies. These are now also entering the geospatial domain and map applications. Increasingly, maps are no longer displayed on the Web as ready-made raster images, but are delivered as raw vector data to the client. The client can then render any map dynamically on the fly and on the client with different styles itself. This opens up a whole new era of web mapping. This still fairly new technology is based on Vector Tiles, a technoloy which is currently still available in various formats; a final standard has not yet been established. As a result, there is still a lot of room for improvement on the server side when providing the data as well as on the client side when developing applications. AdV SmartMapping has set out make these technologies usable with official data sources including survey data but also much more.

---

Vector and raster web maps

Since 01.08.2022 the beta services have been transferred to official products. All information can be found at https://basemap.de/produkte. The following video tutorials will help you to use the services. Please note the new URLs of the basemap.de web services.

Map editing with Maputnik (german):

Vector Tiles in QGIS:

basemap.de Web Raster in QGIS:

---

---

---

Proven Basis

The project is based on new technology and leverages legacy technology, including:

• Debian Linux
• GDAL/OGR
• Postgresql / PostGIS
• T-Rex
• Apache HTTP Server
• MapProxy
• basemap.de viewer based on MapLibre GL

---

Who we are

We are more than 20 experts from the federal states of Germany and work in the geospatial data processing domain. Our work assigment in the AdV working group Smart Mapping is to work on new geospatial data formats and technologies. We come mainly from surveying, software development, cartography, data management and many of us have already gained several years of experience in public administration and with official data. We are supported in our agile way of working by an external service provider, who structures the process of the meetings according to agile methods, provides the development server environment and Open Source software support.

---

How we work

We work in an agile environment. This is not so easy in such a highly distributed team. Therefore we can only use a part of the methods known as Scrum. We work with four teams (Base, VectorTiles, Visualization and Steering) in four-week sprints. We physically meet for Sprint Review, Retrospective, Planning and the start of the next sprint, generally in a place that is centrally located and well connected (so far e.g. in Hannover, Erfurt and Karlsruhe).

If you work in this domain and are interested to join the project please feel free to contact us or even consider joining us in one of our work meetings.

We work highly networked, which is not easy in some administrations, either because basic ports are blocked (e.g. port 22 for a Secure Shell connection) or because common tools for distributed software development like Slack are blocked. But against all odds we are on a good way and have already achieved quite a lot.

Please send Questions and Remarks to the following address: helpdesk@adv-smart.de