Interactive maps are now a staple of our everyday digital life. We use them to learn of our whereabouts, plan the next trip, or review our past travels. In a professional setting, maps became priceless tools for all manner of businesses in planning, operations, and analytics.

An interactive map displays a patchwork of square tiles, each containing a small part of the complete image. A cloud-based service provides these tiles, either by retrieving them from a cache or generating them on-the-fly. The map software manages the display as if showing a continuous bitmap but operates on a tile-basis in the background. Whenever needed, the map software requests new tiles from the service and discards them when they are no longer required. This situation occurs when the user changes the zoom level or pans the map in any direction.

When zooming in or out, the map software stretches or compresses the current display while retrieving the new level’s tiles. It then overlays the new tiles on top of the old ones, providing a pleasant visual continuity.

There is nothing better than a live map example to help build your intuition of what is going on behind the scenes. Please follow the previous link and select the “Show tile borders” option. Browse the map, see how the software juggles the tiles, how it stretches them, and how it replaces and refreshes the content. When hovering each tile with the cursor, the software displays the tile’s coordinates.

#data-processing #interactive #tiles #maps