Possibilities of using raster data in client-side web maps

Abstract

Companies and individual developers have recently put serious effort into improving web mapping libraries. A significant front in this development is hardware-accelerated vector graphics. Owing to those efforts, and the continuously evolving World Wide Web, users can visualize large vector layers, and even animate them. On the other hand, this rapid development cannot be observed with raster data. There are some data abstraction libraries for reading raster files, although web mapping libraries do not use them to offer raster capabilities. Since there are no mature raster management pipelines on the web, this study explores two inherently different techniques for handling raster data. One of them uses the traditional, texture-based method. The other is a hybrid technique rendering raster layers as vectors, overcoming some limitations of the raster model. While the traditional technique gives a smooth user experience, the hybrid method shows promising results for rendering hexagonal coverages.