State of the MapLibre Tile Format

<p>The MapLibre community is currently in the midst of developing the MapLibre Tile Format, a modern, open, and fully community-governed successor to the ubiquitous Mapbox Vector Tile (MVT) format. While MVT has served the mapping ecosystem well for over a decade, it also carries historical constraints that limit interoperability, formal specification quality, extensibility, and independence from proprietary platforms. As MapLibre continues to grow as the central open-source foundation for web-based map rendering, it has become increasingly clear that a future-proof, openly specified, and collaboratively designed tile format is essential.</p> <p>This talk will offer a look into why we initiated this engineering effort and what gaps the new format aims to close. I will explain the core design principles behind the specification—clarity, strictness where needed, optionality where useful, and full transparency throughout the process. Attendees will gain a technical understanding of how the format works, including its data model, feature encoding strategy, metadata approach, and compatibility considerations for existing infrastructure.</p> <p>Beyond the current specification draft, I will outline the major areas still under active development. These include discussions about schema evolution, advanced geometry representations, compression strategies, and interoperability with raster, elevation, 3D and non-geographic datasets. I will also provide insight into the collaborative workflow between maintainers, researchers, vendors, and the wider open-source community, highlighting where contributions and feedback are particularly welcome.</p> <p>Finally, the talk will cover how the rollout is progressing in practice. This includes early tooling support, reference implementations, testing frameworks, and real-world trials by organizations exploring migration paths away from MVT. The session will present an honest, up-to-date snapshot of the project’s status and a forward-looking roadmap for the next stages of development, helping the community understand both what is ready today and what is still on the horizon.</p>