Creating PMTiles from Overture Maps with gpq and tippecanoe

Overture Maps, which is currently largely based on OpenStreetMap data, is an interesting new open geo data source for different applications. This post shows how to download data from Overture Maps and convert it to a PMTiles container for use in serverless map applications and other use cases.

Download Overture Maps transportation data

To download data from Overture Maps, its Python command-line tool is quite handy.

The following two invocations of the tool download the segment and connector features of the transportation layer and store them in two GeoParquet files.

To limit the data downloaded, specify an area's bounding box using the --bbox option.

overturemaps download --bbox=8.715,50.092,8.719,50.094 -f geoparquet --type=segment -o segment.parquet
overturemaps download --bbox=8.715,50.092,8.719,50.094 -f geoparquet --type=connector -o connector.parquet

Convert GeoParquet files to GeoJSON

As the following step needs the transportation features as GeoJSON files, convert the GeoParquet files using the gpq command-line tool:

gpq convert segment.parquet segment.geojson
gpq convert connector.parquet connector.geojson

Create Mapbox / PMTiles vector tiles

With tippecanoe, the features in the GeoJSON files are now converted to Mapbox vector tiles inside a PMTiles container and joined using tippecanoe's tile-join command.

tippecanoe connector.geojson -o connector.pmtiles
tippecanoe segment.geojson -o segment.pmtiles
tile-join transportation.pmtiles segment.pmtiles connector.pmtiles

The PMTiles container can now be used in other applications, for example using MapLibre GL JS.