Last weekend I gave a talk about TopoJSON at State of the map US, the OpenStreetMap conference. TopoJSON is an extension of GeoJSON that encodes topology, enabling interesting visualizations and making for smaller files. The video of my talk is online, you can also see my slides.

The talk is an overview of what TopoJSON is. I also compared the sizes of TopoJSON files to the same data in GeoJSON and found TopoJSON files are about 25–50% the size of the equivalent GeoJSON after gzip. That’s without simplification and GeoJSON rounding comparable to TopoJSON quantization. You get space savings even when there are no shared boundaries, although obviously you get more with shared arcs.

One of the most exciting talks at SotM US was Dane Springmeyer’s talk on what MapBox is doing with their PBF vector tiles. They’ve done a lot of work on making high quality vector data available for cartography. They found they only need to prepare tiles to z=14 (about a square mile); at that scale you can just make the tile encode all features to full precision. They are able to render all of the OSM data for MapBox Streets into just 30GB of tile data in about 100 CPU hours. That’s quite manageable; very exciting.

Dane and I took a quick look and I think their PBF tiles are about the same size as TopoJSON tiles, maybe 15% smaller. OSM data doesn’t have many shared boundaries, so the main thing TopoJSON is doing is delta encoding of arcs. MapBox tiles also use delta encoding. Their PBFs also encode properties more efficiently than JSON, but after gzip I think the difference is less significant.