Skip to main content

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

Project description

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

Build Status Coverage Status

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.

pygeobuf

This repository is the first encoding/decoding implementation of this new major version of Geobuf (in Python). It serves as a prototyping playground, with faster implementations in JS and C++ coming in future.

Sample compression sizes

| normal    | gzipped

us-zips.json

101.85 MB

26.67 MB

us-zips.pbf

12.24 MB

10.48 MB

us-zips.topo.json

15.02 MB

3.19 MB

us-zips.topo.pbf

4.85 MB

2.72 MB

idaho.json

10.92 MB

2.57 MB

idaho.pbf

1.37 MB

1.17 MB

idaho.topo.json

1.9 MB

612 KB

idaho.topo.pbf

567 KB

479 KB

Usage

Command line:

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

As a module:

import geobuf

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

The encode function accepts a dict-like object, for example the result of json.loads(json_str).

Both encode.py and geobuf.encode accept two optional arguments:

  • precision — max number of digits after the decimal point in coordinates, 6 by default.

  • dimensions — number of dimensions in coordinates, 2 by default.

Tests

py.test -v

The tests run through all .json files in the fixtures directory, comparing each original GeoJSON with an encoded/decoded one.

Project details


Download files

Download the file for your platform. If you're not sure which to choose, learn more about installing packages.

Source Distributions

No source distribution files available for this release.See tutorial on generating distribution archives.

Built Distribution

geobuf-1.0.0-py2-none-any.whl (13.7 kB view details)

Uploaded Python 2

File details

Details for the file geobuf-1.0.0-py2-none-any.whl.

File metadata

File hashes

Hashes for geobuf-1.0.0-py2-none-any.whl
Algorithm Hash digest
SHA256 e5eb83ed0ba3dc119c0868040a870c8aa56796fa126a8e5772522b7120215315
MD5 17f3ef49ef86e25117a63c7273c52381
BLAKE2b-256 c64b6f01607b92c496765e360fe46d8ca94c65d813720478464eefd934ddc9e6

See more details on using hashes here.

Supported by

AWS Cloud computing and Security Sponsor Datadog Monitoring Fastly CDN Google Download Analytics Pingdom Monitoring Sentry Error logging StatusPage Status page