[mapserver-users] mapping datasets

[Daniel Morissette]

imap at chesapeake.net wrote:
> 
> Does anyone know of any reasonably priced street level datasets
> for Canada and Mexico?
> 
> I know DMTI Spatial has some good street data for Canada, but they
> are a little pricey for my customer..  I haven't found ANYTHING
> for Mexico.  Any ideas??
> 

No clue about Mexico.  About Canada, you are correct that DMTI and the
few others commercial alternatives are all very pricey.  However,
there's hope... NRCan has started making its 1:50k and 1:250k NTDB maps
available via WMS... not quite the same as having full control on a
local dataset, but can be an interesting option for sites that can't
afford the Cadillac.

I don't have the WMS server's URL in hand, and I'm not even sure if the
URL can be published (I'll follow-up on that next week), but you can see
a sample app that we launched last week and that uses it at:

English: http://www.trailpaq.ca/english/01_find_e/01_find_e.cfm
French:  http://www.trailpaq.ca/francais/01_find_f/01_find_f.cfm

The trails database is not fully populated yet, but there are a bunch of
interesting points in the Ottawa area.

This app uses data from a number of free sources at small scale
(GeoGratis, DCW, etc.) and when it gets to the 1:250k scale then it
starts fetching its maps from NRCan's WMS server with a little bit of
SLD manipulations and the user doesn't notice the difference... except
for the maps being slower to render, but not all servers can be as fast
as MapServer unfortunately...  ;-)

-- 
------------------------------------------------------------
 Daniel Morissette               morissette at dmsolutions.ca
 DM Solutions Group              http://www.dmsolutions.ca/
------------------------------------------------------------
  Don't put for tomorrow what you can do today, because if 
      you enjoy it today you can do it again tomorrow.