OpenStreetMap's New Vector Tiles

> Imagery should appear much sharper and switching the language of the labels should become possible.

So, every eg. city-shape-vector (well.. polygon) will cary the metadata/text of the name of that city in every defined language?

No but you could fetch tiles with only the text you need to patch the tiles you already have.

Large cities already contain the name in many languages. See Paris for example: https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/71525

The usefulness of being able to switch the language depends on the availability of translations of course. It might give editors an incentive to add more translations for place names.

The tiles aren't necessarily a 1:1 translation of the data.

The official tiles will probably be close though.

If there's a Wikidata QID associated with it then one can also use that to look up names in other languages

Just to nip this in the bud, OpenStreetMap in general doesn't contain "translations" it contains the exonyms that are commonly in use for geographic objects. Most of the time things only have a name in the local language so there will be no value for other languages in the OSM data. Transliterations are a bit of a grey area in this context, but are definitely more useful than actual translations which tend to be garbage.

Further point: the data available in the vector tiles is defined by the vector tile schema and by far doesn't contain "everything".

Sure, but that's contained in the database, and then the tiles are generated that only contain one text (usually) in a png form).

Now all the metadata from the table will have to be put into SVG tile files.

The tile schema being used for the current testing (shortbread) doesn't support many languages, but they I think those working on this want to support them once the bugs are worked out.

For an example of how this might look see e.g. https://americanamap.org which uses OSM data, but doesn't aim to be near live like the tiles this thread is about.