Minnesota 3DGeo 500-Meter Tile Index

Minnesota’s 3D Geomatics Committee (3DGeo) - Data Acquisition Workgroup and committee partners have created a new statewide tile indexing scheme for storing, managing, and disseminating lidar data and other geospatial products. 3DGeo required a tiling scheme that recognizes industry standards trending towards cloud optimization which includes a tile scheme that divides the geospatial extent of Minnesota into equal, square-tiled units appropriately sized to mitigate cloud computing and cloud egress costs. Additionally, the tiles must support uniform subdivision into smaller elements that could nest hierarchically in the same data index file or stand alone as separate derivative datasets. This tile architecture brings efficiencies to storage and sharing of modern voluminous data by establishing tiles small enough to ensure only data needed for analysis and download are included in essential tiles. The 3DGeo team tapped into nationwide expertise by conducting interviews with staff from the U.S. Geological Survey and lidar vendors on viable tiling schemes and individual tile size. A 1-kilometer square gridded system proved to be a common tile size for modern lidar management. This tile size supports a simple 500-meter square subdivision suitable for managing lidar data with high point densities requiring smaller tiles.