<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Thu, Feb 19, 2009 at 12:11 PM, Christopher Schmidt <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:crschmidt@metacarta.com">crschmidt@metacarta.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
<div class="Ih2E3d">On Thu, Feb 19, 2009 at 08:31:43AM -0600, David Raasch wrote:<br>
> Then, this morning, I stumbled upon the OpenLayers site.<br>
><br>
> At first, I was quite excited that it seemed somebody was offering a mapping<br>
> API for free! But then, I started reading a bit more and it looks like,<br>
> although the application is free, some of the various layer data sources are<br>
> free for business use and some are not ???? Is that correct?<br>
<br>
</div>OpenLayers does not provide any data. It is the equivilant of the<br>
"Javascript"/"API" portion of the Google Maps API -- the part without<br>
the tiles. However, because it allows you to use different data<br>
providers quickly and easily, you can start by using free, low quality<br>
data sources -- and if the budget comes through next year, you can just<br>
swap in a Google Layer later.<br>
<div class="Ih2E3d"><br>
> With regards to what sort of layers I'm looking for, well, I think we'd just<br>
> like some sort of terrain / satellite view and then accurate street maps.<br>
<br>
</div>"Accurate street maps" can cost a lot of money. However,<br>
<a href="http://openstreetmap.org/" target="_blank">http://openstreetmap.org/</a> is making a freely usable world map that you<br>
could use for this purpose. Depending on how crucial it is that you have<br>
the same quality as something like Google has, OSM may be a free<br>
alternative -- and if it's not, well, it is a wiki after all. Get those<br>
clients to go out and map their town.<br>
<br>
NASA provides 15m satellite data for the world that is relatively<br>
usable, called "Landsat", which may be sufficient if all you want is a<br>
high level overview.<br>
<br>
Regards,<br>
<font color="#888888">--<br>
Christopher Schmidt<br>
MetaCarta<br>
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</div></div></blockquote></div><br>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:<br><br><a href="http://blog.geoserver.org/2009/01/30/geoserver-and-openstreetmap/">http://blog.geoserver.org/2009/01/30/geoserver-and-openstreetmap/</a><br>
<br clear="all">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.<br>-- <br>Sebastian Benthall<br>OpenGeo - <a href="http://opengeo.org">http://opengeo.org</a><br>