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Notes on the History of the Map Tile

Web map tiles—the storing of geospatial data at different zoom levels in x/y/z indexed squares of raster (and later, vector) data for efficient

I’d be surprised if the Where2 guys were reading any of these specific papers as they developed the product that became Google Maps, but the quad tree as a thing in computer science was pretty well established by then so they probably didn’t need to go that far back in the literature to land on this idea. I’m honestly a little embarrassed that I hadn’t tried this before, but a dumbass Google Scholar search for mentions of map tiles and geographic data between 1995 to 2003 led me to a paper by a Bell Labs guy named Michael Potmesil that was presented at the sixth (!) Potmesil was a graphics engineer, he also worked on something at Bell Labs called“ the Pixel Machine.” His citation for using quad trees in a geographic application is Hanan Samet’s The Design And Analysis of Spatial Data Structures.

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