Probing on a Tiled Map
For the past few weeks, we’ve been working through the soft launch of imagineRio, a project we’ve been working on for a couple of years with Rice University. Fun fact: The Portuguese translation of imagineRio is imagináRio which directly translates to imaginary. There’s more background information about the project on the Rice Humanities Research Center website, but in short, the goal of the project was to create a platform to display spatially and temporally accurate reference of Rio de Janeiro from 1500 to the present day. The current front-end for the project uses these maps to display a range of iconography, including maps, plans, urban projects and images of the city (with viewsheds).
The project has numerous technical challenges (which of course pale in comparison to the challenge of digitizing all that historical data), but I just wanted to focus on one of them for this post: data probing and feature identification on a raster map. I’ve always considered data probing in the browser to be something that is exclusive to vector maps. Raster maps are just a collection of pixels. We don’t know the features that are there so we can’t interact with them. Usually that’s OK. Interactive maps are vector thematic data on top of raster base tiles, right? Not always (and yes, we’ll talk about vector tiles another time, this project started 2 years ago):
- What if the thing your map is about is the type of thing usually reserved for basemaps (roads, buildings, natural features, etc)?
- What if you need more map rendering oomph (compositing, labels, etc) than the browser can provide?
- What if your dataset is just too big for the browser to handle as vectors?