Google maps w/ satellite imagery

[Arnulf Christl]

Daniel Morissette wrote:
> 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

Hi,
yes, this makes a lot of sense and i agree with you. I felt like having
to blurt out my ideas because of two issues:

1. we (that is the several hundred people on this and many more lists)
are experts for geodata software, both implementing and using it. We are
not any less serious thinkers and the summed budget of the Open Source
community should also not be underestimated. Its all bits and pieces but
its lots of bits an pieces. Find out how many developers are behind
google maps? That would really be interesting, i bet its less peopel
than those furthering MapServer, GeoServer, PROJ4, GDAL, OGR, deegree,
GEOS and all those other goodies we use every day without much thinking.

So my message should have been: We do not have to hide ourselves behind
"...well funded companies employing serious brain power." Maybe i should
just stop preaching and thats it.
:-)

2. We had a hard time trying to get people to stick to standards and i'd
hate to see a reverssl of that process - although i strongly believe
that this will not happen any more.

Both points stated i fully agree that:

We should definitely not ignore significant developments by large,
well funded companies employing serious brain power.
:-)

Serving several million maps a day will be faster using predefined
tiles. Conceded. Those maps have to be put together with some piece of
software all the same. Why not get the Google map developers to join
Open Source GIS dev instead of having them reinvent the wheel in a way
we cant use. Google already has opened itself a little to the OS
community (maybe because they are not that large at all).

If those maps are created without following any open standards but some
Google standards and become an integral part of our geo websphere then
we will not get rid of them any more.

Sorry, i wanted to stop preaching...

Best, Arnulf.

--
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Arnulf B. Christl
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