geobuf 1.0.0

Geobuf is a compact binary geospatial format for lossless compression of GeoJSON and TopoJSON data.

Advantages over using GeoJSON and TopoJSON directly (in this revised version):

• Very compact: typically makes GeoJSON 6-8 times smaller and TopoJSON 2-3 times smaller.

• Smaller even when comparing gzipped sizes: 2-2.5x compression for GeoJSON and 20-30% for TopoJSON.

• Easy incremental parsing — you can get features out as you read them, without the need to build in-memory representation of the whole data.

• Partial reads — you can read only the parts you actually need, skipping the rest.

• Trivial concatenation: you can concatenate many Geobuf files together and they will form a valid combined Geobuf file.

• Potentially faster encoding/decoding compared to native JSON implementations (i.e. in Web browsers).

• Can still accommodate any GeoJSON and TopoJSON data, including extensions with arbitrary properties.

Think of this as an attempt to design a simple, modern Shapefile successor that works seamlessly with GeoJSON and TopoJSON.

Unlike Mapbox Vector Tiles, it aims for lossless compression of datasets — without tiling, projecting coordinates, flattening geometries or stripping properties.

| normal    | gzipped

geobuf encode < example.json > example.pbf
geobuf decode < example.pbf > example.pbf.json

import geobuf

pbf = geobuf.encode(my_json) # GeoJSON or TopoJSON -> Geobuf string
my_json = geobuf.decode(pbf) # Geobuf string -> GeoJSON or TopoJSON

py.test -v