On-the-fly clustering of Map markers

Posted in Company News and tagged with , on 12/14/2008 09:52 am by admin

The latest installment of the Map for hemnet.se is now out. One of the things we added is clustering of map markers, i.e. particularly dense groups of markers are combined into a cluster marker. To reveal the contents of the cluster marker, the user zooms in a level.

The obvious benefit of this to the user is to reduce clutter. Since we are doing the clustering server-side and on the fly, there is also a significant performance gain.

Clustering algorithms is an interesting field in itself, and there are a plethora of known algorithms used for a variety of clustering applications. We ended up combining grid-based and viral growth techniques.

2 Comments

  1. Brian Fromme Says:
    December 24th, 2008 at 7:23 pm

    Very interesting, Torsten. We are thinking of implementing the same thing for our geospatial multimedia server. I probably won’t be researching the algorithms, but someone here will. Can we be in touch with you about what you think worked best for you?

    take care,
    Brian

  2. admin Says:
    December 24th, 2008 at 9:01 pm

    Hi Brian,

    I’d be happy to share experiences. We didn’t have time to do an extensive evaluation of clustering algorithms, but the one we ended up implementing certainly seems to scale well with the
    number of map markers.

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