lørdag den 11. juli 2009

Modern Web Mapping Technologies


Fin lille artikel om historien bag web maps og hvad der er af muligheder derude idag ...
/Sik


Nice article about various map application trends and the history behind it ...
/Sik


Quote

Modern Internet users have access to the wide range of mapping web services (web maps). If to take a serious view of the entire set of such services, several obvious leaders may be indicated:

The abovementioned services stand out of the line of their rivals thanks to the rich functionality, perfect geographical coverage and user friendliness. Among their functional features is a full-blown map navigation, zooming, and specialized information resources (big cities maps, traffic flow in real-time mode, etc.).

All the mapping web services above support latest versions of popular browsers (IE, Mozilla FireFox, Safari, Opera). At the same time, Google Maps provides the best cross-browser compatibility.

Such services pull geospatial data from specialized commercial data providers.

Of course, services make out their unique functionality. For example, Microsoft mapping web-service offers an opportunity to navigate 3d street maps of the biggest US cities as well as other countries streets, while Google presents unique instrument for developers interested in any applied information on maps Google Maps API.

Microsoft Live Search Maps

Moreover, these services differ in coverage of different regions of a globe as well as relevance of mapping (geospatial) data. For example, Yandex maps provide the most up-to-date information for the territory of CIS (former Soviet Union) countries. Relevance of maps in Google Maps and MS Live Search Maps for different regions is 13 years. Yahoo! Maps falls behind as its data went out 4-5 years ago (incidentally, Yahoo! Ukrainian service has several grave shortcomings, for example it presents sufficient qualitative and true information about Kyiv streets not to say much for other big cities such as Donetsk.

There may be a lot of reasons to prefer a particular Web mapping service. Every user may have his or her own point of view about it. Your particular purpose is the major predominant as for what service to use to meet your current needs. [...]


Read more: http://cogniance.com/expertise/white_papers/modern-web-mapping-technologies

Ingen kommentarer:

Send en kommentar