Neatlacoche is a tool for splitting the OpenStreetMap history planet into tiles, which are known as "Non-Editorialised Analysis Tiles" or NEAT tiles.

The latest history planet, at the time of writing, is 48GB in PBF format. That's a lot of data! While having a lot of data is great, it makes it really, really hard to process and to develop against.

For smaller extracts, there are the Mapzen metro extracts, other extracts, and MaZderMind's history extracts, which are all great projects and really useful for getting a subset of the data to work with on a local machine. However, they are not so useful for performing global analysis piecewise. The concept of tiles can be helpful here, just as the illusion of a seamless, global image can be created using raster or vector tiles, NEAT tiles is an attempt to create the illusion of a seamless, global data set.

Display tiles are loaded on-demand by the client displaying them, and may even be rendered on-demand from a server which contains all the data. But this server is often highly specialised and it's difficult to build extra processing steps on top of its output as it may have already discarded or processed the data in such a way that the original is not recoverable. NEAT tiles tries to extend the idea of tiles all the way down to the original, "non-editorialised" data, in such a way that anyone can build on-demand processing and analysis layers on top of it.

Having said all that, the current state is non-working, work-in-progress, pre-alpha! But if the idea sound exciting, join us - we welcome your contribution.

You should have already installed Go, and you can check out the source code into your $GOPATH like this:

cd $GOPATH
git clone https://github.com/mapzen/neatlacoche.git src/github.com/mapzen/neatlacoche

You will also need some dependencies:

go get github.com/gogo/protobuf/proto
go get github.com/gogo/protobuf/protoc-gen-gogo
go get github.com/gogo/protobuf/gogoproto
go get github.com/syndtr/goleveldb/leveldb
go get github.com/paulmach/go.geo

Then you should be able to:

go install github.com/mapzen/neatlacoche

And the bin/neatlacoche binary should be built. If you encounter any difficulties, please let us know on the issues page.

If you find an issue, please let us know by filing it on the issues page. If you'd like to contribute an improvement, please send us a Pull Request!

Copyright Mapzen 2015. Released under the MIT license, please see COPYING.md for details.

The name is a play on huitlacoche, a Mexican delicacy, and "NEAT" tiles.