Open map List

Tessellation

Introduction

Tessellation (or tiling) is a partitioning of space into mutually exclusive cells that together make up the complete study space. For each cell, a (thematic) value is assigned to characterize that part of space. There are regular and irregular tessellations.

In a regular tessellation, the cells have the same shape and size; a simple example of this is a rectangular raster of unit squares, represented in a computer in the 2D case as an array of n × m elements. These tessellations are known under various names in different GIS packages: Rasters or raster map. The size of the area that a single raster cell represents is called the raster's resolution.

Irregular Tessellation are partitions of space into mutually distinct cells, but now the cells may vary in size and shape, allowing them to adapt to the spatial phenomena that they represent.

Examples

Figure: The three most common types of regular tessellation: from left to right, square cells, hexagonal cells and triangular cells.

 

Synonyms

Raster

Learning outcomes

Prior knowledge

Outgoing relations

Incoming relations

Learning paths