Basemaps, North America and Western Europe

[Steve Wormley]

This isn't really a mapserver question, however I'm hoping someone has done
this before so we don't spend the next 2 months looking for solutions.

My company is working on a mapserver based application to display data from
agents in the field(GPS located) on a map, this works fine with mapserver.

Management wants street level maps displayed for all locations where we
could possibly have agents. Right now our testing is in the US, so I just
grabbed the Tiger data for a quick overview.

Our initial pilot will include Western Europe(UK and France mainly) as well
as the US. So I'm trying to find a good source of data for these regions
that interoperates well with mapserver(shapefiles) or allows us to query
them using WMS. Management likes Mapquest, however all of their stuff
appears to be oriented towards proprietary APIs which would require
significant time to implement. I know that this type of data will not be
inexpensive but Navteq was a bit over what we wanted to pay.

Thanks for any insight,
-Steve Wormley