This is an idea proposed in 2024 as a Cambridge Computer Science PhD topic, and is available for being worked on. It will be supervised by Michael Dales and Anil Madhavapeddy as part of my Mapping LIFE on Earth project.
Some of my projects like Mapping LIFE on Earth or Remote Sensing of Nature involve geospatial base maps with gigabytes or even terabytes of data. This data is usually split up into multiple GeoTIFFs, each of which has a slice of information. For example, the LIFE persistence maps have around 30000 maps for individual species, and then an aggregated GeoTIFF for mammals, birds, reptiles and so forth.
This project will explore how to build an interactive map explorer that will work locally on a webbrowser to let the data be explored without a net connection. This should be low latency, and one way to implement it is to take advantage of webassembly in order to compile the dependency code into a reasonbly high performance bytecode that can be implemented in modern web browsers. The GeoTIFFs will also need to be indexed with a system such as GeoParquet in order to provide real time search support.