Managing update of tiles of dynamic data
Channel: Andrea Ross
Date: 2013-09-27

Tiling is currently the best solution to achieve high performance and throughput for serving map images. However, because tile images have to be prepared, tiling is often only used for relatively static data. The Dutch national facility for presenting governmental spatial plans, www.ruimtelijkeplannen.nl, is used intensively (app. 15.000 plans) and has high performance demands and therefore wanted to make use of tiling. Because plans often change and are added and deleted from the central database, a special solution was developed to manage the daily update of tiles.
The presentation will concentrate on the solution to manage the daily update of tiles, the Tiling Manager. The Tiling Manager software queries the audit trail of plan updates, executes tiling tasks in collaboration with GeoWebCache and monitors progress. We had to deal with several challenges to realize the requirements, such as monitoring progress of tiling tasks in GeoWebCache, run-time generation of GeoWebCache configuration, optimizing WMS performance and assuring that the services will never present old tiles if new plans are available. In addition to the solutions to these challenges the presentation will show the technical architecture of the Tiling Manager.