This document presents HiPS, a hierarchical scheme for the description, storage and access of sky survey data. The system is based on hierarchical tiling of sky regions at finer and finer spatial resolution which facilitates a progressive view of a survey, and supports multi-resolution zooming and panning. HiPS uses the HEALPix tessellation of the sky as the basis for the scheme and is implemented as a simple file structure with a direct indexing scheme that leads to practical implementations.
@article{arxiv.1708.09704,
title = {IVOA Recommendation: HiPS - Hierarchical Progressive Survey},
author = {Pierre Fernique and Mark Allen and Thomas Boch and Tom Donaldson and Daniel Durand and Ken Ebisawa and Laurent Michel and Jesus Salgado and Felix Stoehr},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1708.09704},
year = {2019}
}