Mozilla Stumbler laag: TMS and XYZ lagen laden in QGIS

Mozilla Location Service (MLS) layer
Personally I’m very interested in the Mozilla Location Service (MLS), I wrote an earlier article about it on my work (Zuidt.nl) blog.

Key in this project is that both locations of wifi points and cell towers are crowdsourced and put in a open database, so everybody can use that data to determine his/her position on earth based on some info you get from your laptop or cell phone (without GPS).
This is only possible if as much people as possible start uploading this kind of locations, and as you can see on Mozilla’s overview map it is getting on steam now.
This map layer, showing all blue dot’s on places where locations have been recorded, is a ‘normal’ XYZ tile layer (epsg:3857) generated once a day by Mapbox if I’m correct. After reading Mishari Muqbil blogpost about how to add this ‘blue dot’ layer in OsmAnd android application, I was curious if I could also load this layer in QGIS.
After some searching I found the very nice ‘TileLayerPlugin’ from Minoru Akagi who also is the author of the beautifull Qgis2threejs plugin (have a look into it if you haven’t done so yet!).
So if you want to load xyz map tile layers, like OpenStreetMap, or this Mozilla Stumbler layer in QGIS, do the following:
– via the plugin manager, search for ’tilelayer’ and install the TileLayer Plugin.
– open it’s dialog (initially in the Web menu), and click the Settings button in it and point to some directory on your hard disk for the ‘External layer definition directory’
– in that directory, as you can read in the README at github, you have to put one .tsv file per xyz layer. Note that the values should REALLY be tab-separated, not space separted!
– for the MozStumbler file you need (one!) line like this (tab separated!):
MLSstumber MLSstumber https://d17pt8qph6ncyq.cloudfront.net/tiles/{z}/{x}/{y}.png 1 0 13 -180 -85.0 180.0 85.0
To find the exact cloudfront-url you need, have a look into this json file: in https://location.services.mozilla.com/map.json
As soon as you have those bits in place you can see the blue dots. have a look, the coverage of my hometown is growing:

Arcgis rest service and other layers
But wait… isn’t that the Arcgis / arcgisonline World Topo Map I see there? Yes, it is, Adding one of these lines:
ArcgisWorldTopo esri http://server.arcgisonline.com/ArcGIS/rest/services/World_Topo_Map/MapServer/tile/{z}/{y}/{x}.png 1 0 16 -180 -85.0 180.0 85.0
or
ArcgisWorldImagery esri http://server.arcgisonline.com/ArcGIS/rest/services/World_Imagery/MapServer/tile/{z}/{y}/{x}.png 1 0 16 -180 -85.0 180.0 85.0
makes it possible to see other arcgisonline mapserver rest tile services in QGIS.
In this way it is also possible to load OpenStreetmap Tiles in QGIS, save:
OpenStreetMap © OpenStreetMap contributors http://tile.openstreetmap.org/{z}/{x}/{y}.png 1 0 19
as osm.tsv and see OpenStreetmap in it’s full glory.
I’ve put some tsv files in this zip: http://qgis.nl/tilelayers.zip for you to try out.
Crowdsourced Street Level Photos
Another post of Mishari Muqbil made me aware of another crowd sourcing project: street level photo’s: http://www.mapillary.com/map
While still young, it’s a nice initiative to bring ‘power to the people’ instead of to the big companies 🙂