Google maps w/ satellite imagery

[Kyle Cronan]

My company uses mapserver to generate tiles for a web mapping
application similar to Google's.  We use shp2img to make the tiles and a
DHTML front end pieces them together on the client side.

Using 'PARTIALS FALSE' for all the labels, this generally works quite
well.  However, I have noticed two small problems that cause issues at
the tile edges.  First, 'FORCE TRUE' overrides 'PARTIALS FALSE', a fact
we had to make a small patch to overcome.  And second, when lines are
drawn with a large symbol, the line stops drawing once the symbol center
runs off the map, instead of once the symbol boundary completely leaves
the map area.  Oh and also there are sometimes strange vertical lines of
various colors left at the tile edge.

These small problems aside, kudos to the mapserver developers as we have
been very happy with the results of using mapserver in this kind of
environment!  We now have three maps online: New York City, Washington
DC and King County, WA.  Here they are:

http://www.propertyshark.com/maps/
http://www.propertyshark.com/maps/?map=dc
http://www.propertyshark.com/maps/?map=kc

Using a tiled approach certainly does limit your ability to let the user
customize a map with selectable layers.  But by superimposing layers of
transparent image tiles, we are hoping to recreate some of this
functionality.  The primary difficulty will be in avoiding label
collisions.

Regards,
Kyle Cronan
<kyle at pbx.org>

On Thu, 2005-04-07 at 13:19, Mike Davis wrote:
> Ed-
>
> Thanks for the response, I agree that the approach used by Google,
> TerraServer, etc... is rather limiting to those of us who really like
> to tinker with our on-line maps.  I know I have a great time exploring
> Mapserver/IMS sites, checking out all the layers, and browsing around
> to my hearts content.
>
> That being said, I think there is definately a need to improve the
> user experience in web-mapping applications.  Users can be notoriously
> unforgiving when forced to wait, with anything less than instantaneous
> response considered "slow".  For those instances when flexibility is
> not the primary concern, the ability to pre-generate tiles and cache
> them on the client might be a good solution.
>
> Despite the limited nature of Google's mapping site, it definately
> raises the bar for the rest of the web mapping community.
>
> -Mike