There is no one-size-fits-all map. The Protomaps Basemaps project is designed to offer an 80/20 solution: a default cartographic product that's appropriate for most general-purpose mapping use cases. The remaining use cases can be addressed by forks or more specialized map tile systems.
The tileset defined in tiles is designed to primarily work with the MapLibre GL styles in styles, and vice versa. All features included in the tileset ought to be visualized in the default styles, and the styles should not attempt to visualize any layers or features not included in the tiles. Visual customizations of the map, such as colors, are primarily controlled through Flavor TypeScript objects.
It is possible to build custom MapLibre GL styles (e.g. via the Maputnik editor or hand-coded JSON) without using the Flavor interface, but no special affordances or additions are made for custom styles.
Because basemap tilesets are delivered in the PMTiles format, there is no special privilege assigned to the api.protomaps.com tile service - it's a recent build from maps.protomaps.com/builds. Developers are encouraged to fork and modify this project and then deploy their own tileset to cloud storage.
- License-compatible derived works.
- Deriving visual appearance or logic from the Mapzen (Linux Foundation) open source projects, including Bubble Wrap, Refill and other map styles.
- Deriving from license-compatible projects such as OpenStreetMap Carto and Shortbread.
- Data additions that are included in Tilezen.
- Include a reference to the Tilezen docs at https://tilezen.readthedocs.io/en/latest/layers/ or a link to a Tilezen legacy build at https://pmtiles.io/#url=https%3A%2F%2Fr2-public.protomaps.com%2Fprotomaps-sample-datasets%2Ftilezen.pmtiles
- Visual optimization, generalization and efficiency improvements to the base tileset, base style layers or 5 default Flavors.
- Data or features additions not included in Tilezen
- There is a direct trade-off between the completeness of the map visually and the size of the tiles. The Protomaps Basemap is not designed to represent 100% of OpenStreetMap data. In general, the scope of features follows the Tilezen project, an existing cartographic project that has proven sufficient for many commercial, general-purpose map applications.
- Significant changes to default flavors
- If you want to design a new Flavor, add it to the open-contribution Basemaps Flavors repository.
- License-incompatible derived maps.
- Copying the visual appearance or logic from a proprietary map such as Google Maps, Apple Maps, Esri or Mapbox maps.
- Deriving from other open source but license-incompatible projects like Stamen maps or OpenMapTiles, which use a CC-BY license.
- License-incompatible datasets
- CC-BY or proprietary datasets. In general, data sources should be ODbL-compatible.
- Direct inclusion of Wikidata is discouraged because of the existence of integrated datasets - use a primary source with a single explicit license.
Generally it's fine to use AI tools to help create pull requests as long as you adhere to the following guidelines:
- State in your PR description what AI tool(s) you used to create the PR.
- Make sure a human has reviewed and fully understands all the code changes being submitted.
- Make sure the PR does not contain any unrelated changes.
- Make sure that the PR adheres to the project's coding standards and licensing guidelines.
- No AI-generated media is allowed (art, images, videos, audio, etc.).
This AI policy is based on our upstream dependency, Planetiler.