Whois & Analysis for openmaptiles.org

Mapbox is a large provider of custom online maps for websites such as Foursquare, Pinterest, Evernote, the Financial Times, The Weather Channel and Uber Technologies.

Since 2010, it has rapidly expanded the niche of custom maps, as a response to the limited choice offered by map providers such as Google Maps and OpenStreetMap.

Mapbox is the creator of, or a significant contributor to some open source mapping libraries and applications, including the MBTiles specification, the TileMill cartography IDE, the Leaflet JavaScript library, and the CartoCSS map styling language and parser.

OpenStreetMap (OSM) is a collaborative project to create a free editable map of the world.

The creation and growth of OSM has been motivated by restrictions on use or availability of map information across much of the world, and the advent of inexpensive portable satellite navigation devices.

OSM is considered a prominent example of volunteered geographic information.

Vector tiles, tiled vectors or vectiles are packets of geographic data, packaged into pre-defined roughly-square shaped "tiles" for transfer over the web.

This is an emerging method for delivering styled web maps, combining certain benefits of pre-rendered raster map tiles with vector map data.

As with the widely used raster tiled web maps, map data is requested by a client as a set of "tiles" corresponding to square areas of land of a pre-defined size and location.

Unlike raster tiled web maps, however, the server returns vector map data, which has been clipped to the boundaries of each tile, instead of a pre-rendered map image.

A Web Map Tile Service (WMTS) is a standard protocol for serving pre-rendered georeferenced map tiles over the Internet.

The specification was developed and first published by the Open Geospatial Consortium in 2010.

A geographic information system (or GIS) is a system designed to capture, store, manipulate, analyze, manage, and present spatial or geographic data.

The acronym GIS is sometimes used for geographic information science (GIScience) to refer to the academic discipline that studies geographic information systems and is a large domain within the broader academic discipline of geoinformatics.

What goes beyond a GIS is a spatial data infrastructure, a concept that has no such restrictive boundaries.