Origin of the MapTiler Planet data

MapTiler Planet is compiled from many data sources. Using local data sources increases the quality of the whole dataset and brings the base maps to their best for our customers.

Natural Earth

Natural Earth is a public dataset at 1:10 m, 1:50 m, and 1:110 million scales. Due to its small scale, the detail and quality of these vector data are perfect for showing the entire planet up to zoom 6. This dataset contains cultural vector data - such as countries, administrative divisions, urban polygons, or water boundaries - and physical vector data - such as the ocean, rivers, lakes minor islands, or glaciated areas. We always use the latest version of Natural Earth, currently version 5 (2023-12-19).

OpenStreetMap

OpenStreetMap data is the main data source of our maps. OSM is a collaborative project to create a free editable map of the world and offers street-scale quality data with regular updates. Every day OSM data receive millions of updates from community contributors.

To avoid having low-quality or even misleading edits and inconsistency in data, we collaborate with our partners and use additional tools and technologies on top of OSM to drive a higher level of detail, quality, and accuracy on the map. Our data from OSM are updated twice a month after they’ve been scanned for vandalism, topology errors, and inconsistency.

Building footprints

The building footprints are a joint product of Microsoft Building Footprints, Esri Community Maps Program and Google Open Buildings dataset. They combine the positional accuracy of Microsoft’s footprint data creation and authoritative tags such as name and address provided by authoritative sources in collaboration with Esri. Google Open buildings use a deep learning model that was trained to determine the footprints of buildings from high resolution satellite imagery. This causes one of the biggest steps forward in our maps. Check out the difference between OpenMapTiles and MapTiler Planet in the US, Canada, Australia, parts of Central and South America, as well as parts of Africa and Asia. The building footprint is also updated on bi-weekly basis.

GSI buildings

Thanks to our partnership with a Japanese company Mierune, we got access to a dataset from The Geospatial Information Authority of Japan (GSI). This means that MapTiler users now can see building footprints even in the tiniest mountain village in Japan. GSI updates its data every three months.

Global landcover

Global landcover is a derivated product from imagery made by ESA as a part of the ESA Climate Change Initiative and in particular its Land Cover project. ESA Landcover v1.1 is processed and vectorized into a data source which we use in our MapTiler Planet for global landcover from zoom 0 to zoom 9. Data have six classes: crop, forest, grass, scrub, snow, tree.

USGS landcover

For woodland in the USA, we use a data source produced by The United States Geological Survey (USGS). Land Cover - Woodland is a dataset that gathers woodland datasets from each of the states with irregular updates according to USGS standards. The latest version is from June 2021.

Canadian landcover

Canadian open data offer the Land Features dataset as part of the CanVec series. The land features of the CanVec series contain landscape features of Canada such as islands, shoreline delineation, wooded areas, saturated soil features, and landform features (esker, sand, etc.). These data are further processed and reclassified to fit in our schema. It results in a very detailed land cover, even in the most remote parts of Canada. The currently used dataset was published in March 2019.

Glaciers

For polygons of glaciers we use open data from the GLIMS project. GLIMS (Global Land Ice Measurements from Space) is an initiative designed to monitor the world’s glaciers primarily using data from optical satellite instruments.

Useful links

MapTiler Planet Schema

Natural Earth Data
ArcGIS Community Maps
Building Footprints
Japan GSI
Open Street Map
GLIMS