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Hi,<br>
<br>
I work for an LBS based company, we have our own proprietary
rendering engine for producing maps, and we work mainly with data
from Navteq and Teleatlas. Presently our rendering engine is behind
the competition in terms of visual quality (we have a bad support
for antialiasing, label names with both native and transliterate
names are missing, and so on). Introducing new features in our
current rendering architecture would require quite a lot of coding
and re-engineering, so we are looking for alternative renderers,
possibly open sourced. During this research project I came across
Mapserver, and it seems it would suit our needs in terms of high
quality rendering and customization.<br>
However, there are still some open issues, mainly questions, I'd
like to ask.<br>
<br>
In regards to rendering:<br>
1) Is there any way to align labels in different encondings for the
same city? I mean something like writing Москва́ and <i>Moskvá </i>vertically
aligned, like on Google Maps.<br>
2) Is there any plan to support 2.5D rendering for buildings?<br>
<br>
In regards to working with high loads of data:<br>
1) We render our maps from data provided by vendors like Navteq, and
they have a lot of details and features. Is there anyone working in
the same field, who could share some of his experience?<br>
2) Is it more efficient to work with PostGis/Oracle Spatial or with
shapefiles? I suppose the former would be faster, since shapefiles
provided by Navteq would require about 100gigs for Europe only, just
to store the data. <br>
3) In regards to the hardware, I reckon we would need at least one
workstation dedicated to rendering. Currently we are hosting our
rendering service on dual Xeon (quad core), with 16G of ram and SAS
arrays of hard disks, would one server like this be ok or would it
be better to have more machines, especially if planning to use RDBMS
to hold the data? I'm asking this because with currently work with
detailed data from Europe, North and South America, so it's quite a
lot of stuff :)<br>
<br>
Thanks in advance for any feedback.<br>
<br>
Regards,<br>
<br>
Paolo Crosato<br>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
Paolo Crosato
Ubiest SPA
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.ubiest.com">http://www.ubiest.com</a>
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