Dynamic tiled map services: supporting query-based visualization of large-scale raster geospatial data

  • Authors:
  • Jianting Zhang;Simin You

  • Affiliations:
  • City College of New York, New York, NY;City University of New York Graduate Center, New York, NY

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 1st International Conference and Exhibition on Computing for Geospatial Research & Application
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

Query based visual explorations of raster geospatial data plays an important role in stimulating scientific hypothesis and subsequently seeking casual relationships. While it is desirable to enable visual explorations of large-scale raster geospatial data in a Web environment, improving the end-to-end performance between query backend and the client applications remains a challenging technical issue. Techniques for providing tiled map services that are adopted by major commercial Internet maps APIs have been successful in handling static geospatial data. Motivated by the practical needs of supporting query-based visual explorations in a Web environment, we have proposed a dynamic tiled map services approach that integrates and extends existing Web-based standards and best practices in serving tiled images for static raster geospatial data. The approach includes quadtree-based indexing and query processing at the server side and a middleware to efficiently convert quadrants of dynamic query results into tiled images. A prototype system has been developed to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach. Experimental results have showed that the prototype system achieves an end-to-end performance in the order of sub-second for 1024*1024 pixels display area consisting of multiple tiles.