GIS orchestration application
The pipeline that produces the Woodfine co-location rankings and the interactive map at gis.woodfinegroup.com is a Python data pipeline, not a standing service — it holds no canonical data of its own and produces no output until it runs. Each nightly rebuild reads current business and places datasets, re-clusters them, re-tiers each cluster, and writes fresh map tiles; the tiles it produces are what the site actually serves between rebuilds.
Tier assignment
The pipeline assigns every cluster one of four tiers by testing it against the retail co-location tier methodology — composition, catchment-population rank, civic support, and non-overlap with stronger neighboring clusters. Tier assignment is a pass/fail classification against fixed gates, not a composite numeric score.
Tile generation
The pipeline compiles scored output into vector tile assets for delivery to the interactive map:
- Vector tiles: PMTiles format for client-side rendering without a dedicated tile server [pmtiles-spec]
- Rendering: MapLibre GL JS processes the tiles client-side at high performance [maplibre-gl-js]
- Visual tiers: Spatial convergence across anchor categories (primary, hardware, warehouse, civic) maps to the four-tier visual classification on the map surface, per the tier methodology above
Rebuild cadence, not a request-driven service
The pipeline runs on a nightly schedule, not on demand. A rebuild re-clusters current source data, regenerates the tile layers, and publishes the result; the site between rebuilds serves whatever the last successful run produced. This makes recovery simple in one specific sense: a lost or corrupted tile set is replaced by the next scheduled rebuild, or an on-demand re-run, with no state migration required. It also means the published map reflects data as of the last rebuild, not the current instant.
See also
- Location intelligence substrate — the rendering layer that serves tiles produced by this pipeline
- Retail co-location tier methodology — the tier methodology implemented by the pipeline
- Location intelligence platform — the platform article covering the full GIS deployment