The tiled map is a technology commonly used by online map services. With the
generated tiles, the efficiency of accessing an online map is improved
greatly. The tile types provided by SuperMap contain: vector tiles and
traditional raster tiles.
- Raster tiles : Taking images as mediums makes online maps widely used. The advantages of raster tiles are high display efficiency, and can be transferred conveniently. But with the mobilization of maps and the gradual deepening of applications, raster tiles occupy large bandwidth and storage, which is not conducive to the application of maps in mobile devices.
- Vector tiles : The appearance of vector tiles makes up deficiencies of raster tiles. Vector tiles data is stored in vector format. Vector tiles have small volume and can be highly compressed and the space occupied by vector tiles can be thousands of times less than by raster tiles, and the transferring volume is small thereby lead to the cost of map updates is small.
- In the online map service application, the raster tiles are mainly used as the base map while the vector tiles are often used to store the vector layers used for querying and changing frequently. The utility of vector tiles is reflected in its smaller size, faster rendering, more flexibility, and more convenient updating in clients; therefore, it is more suitable for the expression of features in the map that require high timeliness, such as POI information and routes, etc. Common online map services, such as Google Maps, Baidu Maps, etc., use raster tiles as basemaps and overlay vector tiles.
supports generating vector tiles that follow the MapBox MVT specification for vector maps. Tile data contains feature geometry and attribute information, while feature styles are described by the MapBox standard style file (style.json). Vector tiles have the advantages of stepless scaling, style modification, and relatively small amount of data compared to grid tiles, which can better meet flexible and diverse Web map applications.