different tiling methods

[Jeff Portwine]

Ahh thank you for the explanation... I guess functionally it was doing just what I wanted it to do but I was thinking about how it was doing it in completely the wrong way.    

Thanks for the explanation.   

-Jeff
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Ed McNierney 
  To: Jeff Portwine ; MAPSERVER-USERS at LISTS.UMN.EDU 
  Sent: Wednesday, April 27, 2005 9:01 AM
  Subject: RE: [UMN_MAPSERVER-USERS] different tiling methods


  Jeff -

  No, actually, those tools don't work that way at all <g>.

  tile4ms creates a new, separate tile index shapefile.  It does not combine shapefiles into one shapefile.  Each input shapefile has its bounding box retrieved, and a rectangular polygon is created in the new tile index shapefile.  If you started with N shapefiles you now have N+1 shapefiles - all the originals and the index file.

  Let's say each original shapefile contained data for a particular country.  If you wanted to create a map showing every country, you would have to create a few hundred separate layers then group them together.  By creating a tile index layer, you can take a large number (or small number) of separate shapefiles and treat them AS IF they were one single large shapefile - but they're not.

  This is the primary benefit of a tile index.  IF your data in the separate files are relatively constrained to rectangular regions, then the tile index also will offer you a performance improvement.  It's like a new top-level index for your data.  If you're looking at a large-scale map of Europe, the tile index file will immediately discard any of those input country files whose rectangular bounding boxes do not overlap the output map area.  Most of the input country files will never be opened - only the few files that might possibly contribute to the output map are opened and read.  For large data sets this improves performance.

  Steve's shp2tile utility helps to create such an appropriate set of input files, by taking a single large input shapefile and chopping it up into rectangular pieces.

  shptree creates a spatial quadtree index for a shapefile that makes it quicker to locate objects inside that file.  This is virtually always a good idea, and easy to do.

  You may have to tune your data set sizes to get the right balance.  The goal is to use the tile index file to quickly discard data that cannot possibly be needed for an output map request.  If you end up rendering all the data, or opening all the files, it will do you no good at all.

       - Ed

  Ed McNierney
  TopoZone.com 



------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  From: UMN MapServer Users List [mailto:MAPSERVER-USERS at LISTS.UMN.EDU] On Behalf Of Jeff Portwine
  Sent: Wednesday, April 27, 2005 8:30 AM
  To: MAPSERVER-USERS at LISTS.UMN.EDU
  Subject: [UMN_MAPSERVER-USERS] different tiling methods



  Hi Everybody,

  I have a general question for my own education, it doesn't directly pertain to anything I'm working on right now.    I was just wondering if anybody could explain to me the difference in different ways of tiling map images?     In my current project, I had several large layers such as road layers and water layers that I tiled in order to make them faster and more resource friendly... The method I used was:

  -tile4ms <data.txt> <tile name>   
  (where data.txt is a list of all the shapefiles being included in the tiling, since tiger data comes in about a zillion files)
  -shptree <tile name>
  -cat <data.txt> | xargs -n 1 shptree

  The way I understand it, this combines all the pieces into one shapefile, tiles them, and spatially indexes them...  is that correct?   

  In a recent post I also saw a pointer to Steve Woodbridge's shp2tile utility which it seems does much the same thing... the main difference being from the sounds of it that it doesn't put a lot of shapefiles together, but rather splits a single large shapefile into tiles and then indexes them.   How is this different from the first method, and how does it affect resources and rendering speed?   Or is the only real difference the one I noted where you are sticking multiple shapefiles together one way and only using one original shapefile the other way?

  Are there other methods of tiling that behave differently or that you might use for different situations?

  Thanks everybody,
  Jeff
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