Tile

Pipe made of baked clay.

The spatial unit by which geographic data is organized, subdivided, and stored in a map library. Tiles subdivide the area covered by a map library and organize the library data by location (e.g., counties might be the tiles in a statewide database). A tile can be a regular, geometric shape (e.g., a map sheet), or an irregular shape, such as a county boundary. See also LIBRARIAN.