This is a tool for indexing large lists of geographic points or lines and dynamically generating map tiles from the index for display.

There are currently lots of hardwired assumptions that need to be configurable eventually, but the basic idea is that if you have a file of points like this:

40.711017,-74.011017
40.710933,-74.011250
40.710867,-74.011400
40.710783,-74.011483
40.710650,-74.011500
40.710517,-74.011483

or segments like this:

40.694033,-73.987300 40.693883,-73.987083
40.693883,-73.987083 40.693633,-73.987000
40.693633,-73.987000 40.718117,-73.988217
40.718117,-73.988217 40.717967,-73.988250
40.717967,-73.988250 40.717883,-73.988433
40.717883,-73.988433 40.717767,-73.988550

you can index them by doing

cat file | ./encode -o directoryname -z 16

to encode them into a sorted quadtree in web Mercator in a new directory named directoryname, with enough bits to address individual pixels at zoom level 16.

You can then do

./render -d directoryname 10 301 385 

to dump back out the points that are part of that tile, or

./render directoryname 10 301 385 > foo.png

to make a PNG-format map tile of the data. (You need more data if you want your tile to have more than just one pixel on it though.)

Alternately, if you want an image for a particular area of the earth instead of just one tile, you can do

./render -A -- directoryname zoom minlat minlon maxlat maxlon > foo.png

The bounds of the image will be rounded up to tile boundaries for the zoom level you specified. The "--" is because otherwise getopt will complain about negative numbers in the latitudes or longitudes.

The point indexing is inspired by Brandon Martin-Anderson's Census Dotmap. The vector indexing is along similar lines but uses a hierarchy of files for vectors that fit in different zoom levels, and I don't know if anybody else does it that way.

Encoding currently assumes you can mmap an entire file into memory and sort it in place, so be careful about large files on small machines. Rendering also mmaps the entire file, but it's read-only so it's not so bad if it doesn't all fit. Large files will not work on 32-bit operating systems.