Give Spaten a Spin: Introducing a Data Repository

In 2017 the Grandine project has been introduced, which helps working with geodata in a streamable fashion. At the core of the project the new file format “Spaten” for passing around geo data has been introduced. A lot of people reached out to me, wanting to explore the possibilites.

In order to facilitate work with the provided tooling, the Spaten file repository is released today: It is a collection of Geo Data files which are free to use and can be processed with any Spaten-compatible tool, like the Go library, the Python implementation or the Grandine Tools.

For now, the datasets are all based on Natural Earth and therefore released into the public domain. The data sets contain physical and cultural vector data at different scales: 10 m, 50 m and 100 m resolution.

The download overview is reachable under https://thomas.skowron.eu/spaten/download/

The Spaten file format is very efficient and therefore optimal for geo data applications at any scale: Decoding is at average 5x faster than GeoJSON and file sizes are up to 50 % smaller.

To generate a vector tile set from a spaten file, just type:

grandine-tiler -in ne_10m_airports.spaten -zoom 10