[mapserver-users] topo.com (National Geographic Maps)

[Ed McNierney]

Rod -

The Topo!/National Geographic maps are very attractive products, but
they have nothing to do with serving maps on the Web.

The Topo! products are CD-ROM raster map products with viewing software.
As far as I know, Topo! (when they were Wildflower Productions) were the
first vendors to produce topographic maps on CD-ROM for viewing.  They
purchased printed USGS maps and scanned them themselves.  As I recall,
they added the hillshading (shaded relief) later on.

The resulting images are very nice, but they're really just static
images.  From a map viewing and serving perspective, there's no "server"
or on-the-fly rendering involved.  They just show you portions of a very
big pre-generated picture.

The Topo! maps are not viewable on the Web in any way, shape or form
(although it wouldn't be hard to do so).  They only have a few sample
images up on their Web site.

The ability to add shaded relief to MapServer maps is something I've
been working on as a back-burner project for a while.  There are a few
different ways to attack the problem, but several routes require
MapServer to support 24-bit color images (at least while rendering -
they can be downsampled before being sent to the client).  As has been
discussed in other threads, there is a good bit of interest in 24-bit
MapServer rendering but a number of technical hurdles that will make
sure it doesn't happen excessively soon (at least not in a general way).

	- Ed

Ed McNierney
Chief Mapmaker
TopoZone.com
ed at topozone.com

-----Original Message-----
From: Roderick A. Anderson [mailto:raanders at tincan.org]
Sent: Tuesday, December 18, 2001 5:44 PM
To: mapserver-users at lists.gis.umn.edu
Subject: [mapserver-users] topo.com (National Geographic Maps)


While looking a a friends site/project I noticed he has some very nice
maps that came from topo.com.  After looking at the site I couldn't
decide if it had been mentioned on the list plus a search turned up
zero.
   My take is that they mostly off maps that have been pre-generated or
scanned in.  They do look nice.  Shaded relief and the contour lines
make them pleasant to look at and usable.

So where am I dragging this?  Well has anyone done similar look-and-feel
stuff with mapserver?  Is it possible?  I realize much of it would be
CPU and time intensive and therefore not very responsive in the
web-world.


Cheers,
Rod
-- 
                      Let Accuracy Triumph Over Victory

                                                       Zetetic Institute
                                                        "David's Sling"
                                                         Marc Stiegler