[OpenLayers-Users] Just discovered OpenLayers -> free data sources for businesses?

[Sebastian Benthall]

On Thu, Feb 19, 2009 at 12:11 PM, Christopher Schmidt <
crschmidt at metacarta.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Feb 19, 2009 at 08:31:43AM -0600, David Raasch wrote:
> > Then, this morning, I stumbled upon the OpenLayers site.
> >
> > At first, I was quite excited that it seemed somebody was offering a
> mapping
> > API for free!  But then, I started reading a bit more and it looks like,
> > although the application is free, some of the various layer data sources
> are
> > free for business use and some are not ????  Is that correct?
>
> OpenLayers does not provide any data. It is the equivilant of the
> "Javascript"/"API" portion of the Google Maps API -- the part without
> the tiles. However, because it allows you to use different data
> providers quickly and easily, you can start by using free, low quality
> data sources -- and if the budget comes through next year, you can just
> swap in a Google Layer later.
>
> > With regards to what sort of layers I'm looking for, well, I think we'd
> just
> > like some sort of terrain / satellite view and then accurate street maps.
>
> "Accurate street maps" can cost a lot of money. However,
> http://openstreetmap.org/ is making a freely usable world map that you
> could use for this purpose. Depending on how crucial it is that you have
> the same quality as something like Google has, OSM may be a free
> alternative -- and if it's not, well, it is a wiki after all. Get those
> clients to go out and map their town.
>
> NASA provides 15m satellite data for the world that is relatively
> usable, called "Landsat", which may be sufficient if all you want is a
> high level overview.
>
> Regards,
> --
> Christopher Schmidt
> MetaCarta
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>

If you are looking for help bringing OSM's data as a nicely styled base
layer into OpenLayers, you may want to check out this blog post:

http://blog.geoserver.org/2009/01/30/geoserver-and-openstreetmap/

At the bottom of the post is a link to an example that shows how to use
OpenLayers to pull in the layer from a public WMS (GeoServer) that is cached
with GeoWebCache.
-- 
Sebastian Benthall
OpenGeo - http://opengeo.org
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