What are the advantages/disadvantages of a gridded approach to representing spatial extents?
The main advantage of a gridded approach (e.g., as compared with point data, or vector polygon boundaries) is relatively rapid searching, by seeking the relevant tile names, to see whether data or subject matter is present in the user’s desired region of interest. There may be a cost elsewhere in producing the gridded representations to begin with, e.g. from data supplied as polygons, however this is an up front cost (compile once, use many times) and can be conducted as a background and/or offline task, similar to the continuous index-building tasks undertaken by an internet search engine as it crawls the web.
