Admin 0 polygons with updated dispute boundaries and 4 different worldviews, created with MTS
By: Arun Ganesh
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The high-resolution administrative level-0 country polygon collection in Mapbox Boundaries is now available to all designers and developers using the new version Studio versionfree. Each country’s polygon includes updates to key areas of dispute and support for four different worldviews, making it easy to accurately create country-level choropleths or individual country styles.
Covid Controls uses new constraints in Studio to visualize how countries are responding to the pandemic in real-time. From lockdown statuses to traveler restrictions to case rates, the team at travel planning site Escape designed these maps so travelers have access to the most up-to-date data — dynamically aggregated into boundary polygons that allow data layers to continually update as restrictions become official. or changes to essential services in each country.
“It’s easy to combine data into any form and this significantly reduces our engineering time and data maintenance. The quality of the polygons in Mapbox Boundaries is critical to allowing us to create a differentiated user experience.”
— Mohit Shah, Founder at Escape
Data in Studio
Updated country boundary polygons are available in Studio, and we recently updated the code examples to combine data into polygons and style single countries. Full details and specifications are on the vector tile reference documentation page, including a list of all available properties including ISO alpha-2, ISO alpha-3, Wikidata ID, color group, and UN M49 regions & subregions.
Dogfooding MTS, and recipe examples
We continually update our limits on use Mapbox Tiling Service (MTS), which is now open to all developers. MTS is the same channel we use internally to curate 4 million global polygons in Mapbox Boundaries. In our latest update, we added a new set of US legislative boundaries at four different levels to improve data analysis and visualization, including Congressional districts and state legislatures. Here’s an example of the MTS recipe (configuration document) we used to create this tileset:
Simplification of using recipes: Simplifying data through MTS means removing complexity at feature geometry nodes. Simplification is helpful because each additional node must be translated to vector grid coordinates and the fewer nodes translated, the faster the processing and rendering. The lower the simplification value, the more precise your features are. In the recipe above, we have optimized simplification at low zoom levels for certain countries, ensuring small island nations like the Maldives don’t oversimplify while the shapes for Greenland and Antarctica have extra simplification on their complex coastlines to reduce the final tile size.
Setting feature ID: Recipes in MTS allow our team to assign a unique feature ID to each feature, in the case of Map Grid Boundaries which is a unique ID for each country polygon. We use each feature ID to support client-side data visualization and interaction, for example with GL JS’s setFeatureState.
Controlling Feature Order: The order of features in a grid affects the visibility of overlapping features in the map. By defining data attributes that can be used for feature ordering in MTS, we can ensure that overlapping dispute polygons always appear above country polygons on the map.
Allowed Output: vector tile attributes, encoded as strings, usually require a large number of bytes. If the source data has many feature attributes, it is important to only include the attributes in the tile set that are required for styling — this is where allow_output comes into play in recipes for MTS!
Arun Ganesh – Cartographer – Borders – Map Grid | LinkedIn
Map feature data from map box And OpenStreetMap and their data partners.
Studio’s high-resolution administrative country polygons were originally published in a map for developers on Medium, where people continued the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
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