GeoTiles.nl: readymade geodata with a focus on the Netherlands.
2021-02-10: Sentinel-2 tiles are under development, supported by the NCG Talent Progam 2021: status updates.
Nationwide data sets are overwhelming in size, even in a small country like the Netherlands. This website is an extension to my own work that started in 2017 on taming the point cloud of Actueel Hoogtebestand Nederland (AHN2, 640 billion points, back in the day). Result is a tiled version, including overlap, that allows for massive parallel processing of the point cloud. This tiling has shown its value in finding the nearest neighbour for all points between AHN2 and AHN3, a job that took only one day to programm and one evening to run thanks to the TU Delft cluster.
As a PhD candidate at the Delft University of Technology handling data is an important part of my working day. However, the struggle to make data 'work' is energy not spent on research. Data accessibility is a necessity as well as a driving factor for innovation. Luckily, once you are able to extract your region of interest, you are likely to be able to automate it support others in the same effort. Furthermore, the tiling led to some experimental work, not possible without the dataset in its current format, such as experiments on the flightline alignment within AHN.
Commercial initiatives aim at production systems that require frequent updates. GeoTiles.nl is aimed at R&D instead, and tries to enable fast access to data for (student) projects. Since 2019, the project has grown in size, to approximately 30 TB (September 2020). Many data sets have been collected, and the collection now includes aerial photographs and tiled versions of the Basisregistraties, as well as a full archive of Sentinel-2 imagery over the Netherlands. The map provides access to the available products. Lower zoom levels show the main tiles, the sub-units will only be shown at higher zoom levels.
A proxy server with a 1 TB cache is in place to serve the most frequently requested files fast from a datacenter in Germany. However, less popular files have to be fetched from the main archive. The bandwidth from the archive is typically only 1/10 of the bandwidth from the cache server. If you are downloading large portions of data, you are kindly asked to observe the X-Cache header via a HEAD request. Files that report HIT or REVALIDATED are (partially) available from the cache and should be downloaded first, not to overwrite the existing cache with new files. Dates provided as Last-Modified are accurate on this server.
A limit of 10 parallel connections for each client is enforced by the server. However, oncurrent connections are in practice only faster for cached files. Moreover, the service provided is not intended to be included in automated downloads of software packages without prior consultation. If you would like to aquire large portions of the dataset, it might be faster to get in touch and arrange either a direct connection or transfer via harddrive.
No financing was/is provided by third parties. The initial project, the tiling and coloring of AHN3 point clouds, was part of my MSc-thesis. All other data sets were processed in my spare time on private equipment.
No guarantee on availability, completeness, correctness or fitness for any particular purpose is implied by the distribution of or linking to this data. Keep this in mind if you integrate this data into your projects and/or products. The license indicated with the products is to the best of my knowledge at the time of writing. Please confirm the applicable license with the source before integrating the data. This index and derived products (spatial index, colored point clouds, sub-tiles, etc.) are copyright GeoTiles.nl and are distributed under the CC-BY 4.0 license.
This website/archive uses data and tools provided by others. Maps provided by PDOK and OpenLayers. Software used in processing: GDAL/OGR, PDAL, make, python (GeoPandas, lxml) and LASTools. Private analytics are performed using Matomo (formerly Piwik), the last byte of IP-addresses are truncated before storage and a DNT header respected to ensure privacy.