Google maps w/ satellite imagery

[Daniel Morissette]

Arnulf Christl wrote:
>
> Googlemaps is a nice experiment but we KNOW that it is no good in the
> long run. Have a look at the scales and resolution satellite image they
> offer, this is a minuscule fraction of all satellite and ortho images
> available world wide - as WMS. And googlemaps will never ever be able to
> be integrated with any of those datasets. What a waste of energy.
>

I disagree. WMS services all over the internet and interoperability are
nice for some types of applications, but when all you need is to plot
the location of your house or business on a map, then what Google offers
is *exactly* what you need, no more, no less.


> Hey - we are falling back into medieval raster tile viewers - i thought
> that we had overcome those times long ago. Somebody should really point
> this out to Google, else they might make a big mess of the standardized
> infrastructures that are slowly emerging all over the place. We should
> not let this happen.
>

For very high traffic sites serving millions of maps per day and where
there is no need for being able to add/remove layers dynamically, then I
think that using tiles or caching pre-generated maps is a great way to
optimize your use of resources. It's not because the idea is old that it
was not good, serving tiles or pregenerated map images will always be
faster than generating the maps on the fly from vector data.

My 0.02$

Daniel
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  Daniel Morissette               dmorissette at dmsolutions.ca
  DM Solutions Group              http://www.dmsolutions.ca/
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