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Get started with Mapzen Vector tiles

Mapzen Vector Tiles provide basemap coverage of the world in several vector tile formats. Tiles are available for zooms 0 through 16 and are available in several spatial data formats including MVT and GeoJSON. Learn more about the various data formats offered.

Get an API key

To use Mapzen's hosted vector tile service in a project, obtain an API key from Mapzen.

Once you have your Mapzen API key you'll need include it with Vector Tile requests as a URL query string like:

?api_key=your-mapzen-api-key

Use the Vector Tile service

Request a single tile with this URL pattern to get started:

https://tile.mapzen.com/mapzen/vector/v1/{layers}/{z}/{x}/{y}.{format}?api_key=your-mapzen-api-key

The OpenStreetMap Wiki has more information on this url scheme.

Here’s a sample tile in GeoJSON:

https://tile.mapzen.com/mapzen/vector/v1/all/16/19293/24641.json?api_key=your-mapzen-api-key

Specify layers in the service

Layers to return can specified as all, or as one or more layer names separated by commas. Using the all layer is more performant.

buildings: https://tile.mapzen.com/mapzen/vector/v1/buildings/16/19293/24641.json?api_key=your-mapzen-api-key

earth,landuse: https://tile.mapzen.com/mapzen/vector/v1/earth,landuse/16/19293/24641.json?api_key=your-mapzen-api-key

Layers in the service's response

When requesting a single layer, the response will be a single FeatureCollection, without any layer name prefix:

{
   "type":"FeatureCollection",
   "features": [...],
   ...
}

When requesting multiple layers in GeoJSON, a dictionary of FeatureCollections will be returned, keyed by layer name:

{
   "earth": {
      "type":"FeatureCollection",
      "features": [...],
      ...
   },
   "landuse": {
      "type":"FeatureCollection",
      "features": [...],
      ...
   }
}

Available tile formats

Mapzen vector tiles can be returned in the following formats.

  • GeoJSON: use the .json extension. GeoJSON is easy to get started with, human-readable, and compatible with many tools
  • TopoJSON: use the .topojson extension. TopoJSON is an optimized form of JSON that saves space by encoding topology and reducing replication of shared geometry.
  • Mapbox-format binary tiles: use the .mvt extension. This is a compact format using protocol buffers that is used for raster tile rendering in TileMill2 and vector rendering in MapboxGL

Security

Mapzen Vector Tiles works over HTTPS, in addition to HTTP. You are strongly encouraged to use HTTPS for all requests, especially for queries involving potentially sensitive information.