Tilelevel

Tilelevel is a term used in tiling systems and digital mapping to denote the hierarchical resolution level of tiles. It is commonly synonymous with the zoom level, indicating how much detail a tile contains: as the tilelevel increases, tiles cover smaller geographic areas and display more detail.

In a typical web mapping tiling scheme, the world is tiled starting at level 0 with a single tile that covers the entire projection. At level L, the global extent is divided into 2^L by 2^L tiles; each tile is usually 256 by 256 pixels in raster tiles. The tile coordinates (x, y) identify a specific tile at that level. A request path such as /{z}/{x}/{y}.png uses z as the tilelevel.

Tilelevel enables level-of-detail management: clients render tiles from appropriate levels based on viewport and scale, and servers cache tiles by level to optimize bandwidth. In vector tiling, the concept plays similarly, with tiles containing vector features at a given level of detail.

Tilelevel relates to formal standards and structures: in WMTS and other tiling schemes, tile matrices define a grid of tiles at each level, including identifiers, scale denominators, and matrix dimensions. The terms level, zoom, and tilematrix are used in different systems, but all refer to the same underlying idea of progressively finer resolution tiles.

Examples: Google Maps and OpenStreetMap use a zoom-based tilelevel system, with common ranges from 0 up to 19 or higher depending on dataset and projection. Understanding tilelevel helps in designing efficient map services, caches, and client rendering strategies.