Google maps w/ satellite imagery

[Bob Basques]

>
>The hard part of such a system would be keeping track of these dynamically
>sized tiles cached on the client, and getting your labels right, but it
>doesn't seem impossible. The label issue might be solved by pulling a
>seperate "normal" labels-only mapserver layer after the base map loads. That
>way each pan reveals more map, and the user only has to wait for mapserver
>to create new labels.
>
>
Another approach to this might be in the caching of tiles on the server
side dynamically, where the initial requests are generated and stored vs
pre-generating everything, this has the added benefit of only building
tiles that are being referenced many times vs tile that may only seldom
be requested as well as only building those tiles from specific zoom
levels.

Related to the zooming in STEPS vs completely dynamically, you could
have two modes of operation, one "SPEED" mode that would use the STEPped
zooming, and a second "ACCURACY" mode for getting exactly what you
want.  The server could still use the same tiling system on the server,
but handle the between step interpolation of the data dynamically from
the tiles or even from the Data sources themselves in a typical
Mapserver install.

If you add in an additional step of tiling a larger image generation
into smaller tiles, you would get around the label problem, this would
all be serverside trickery, but it would help out with tile writing and
keeping track of which tiles are how old and whether they might have
label artifacts along the edges or not (the server would generate new
edge tiles if the edge were crossed in subsequent requests for example).

bobb

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>Jeremy
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