Googlish MapFile

[Bob Basques]

All,

I'm done with the cartography, I think.

Anyone see any problems with it that are obvious?  Again, this is only
the road network, and it's only for a local dataset.   

http://gis.ci.stpaul.mn.us/gis/gismo_public/html/?mapbook=/datasets/CONFIGS/SAINT_PAUL/PUBLIC_WORKS/MAPBOOKS/TS/gismo3_test_public.xml#

Unless someone comes up with an errors somewhere, I think I may post
this tomorrow sometime.  It still needs some work and I'll be adding to
the comments the rest of the week.  I think I'll version the releases
until I get to something stable, but I think it's usable as is already,
and I got a couple of requests for it already.

I'm also planning on adding in the TIGER lines to this test interface, I
only got out as far as six steps away from the world view in Google. 
I'll finish it off with the TIGER data.

-------

Some stuff that came up this week, I've done all the thresholding based
on FEET as the units of measure, and our data is in a local County
coordinate system.  Anyone have an idea for a good neutral coordinate
system to use for the TIGER line dataset that would be the most flexible
for folks?

Another item I wondered about, would it help to separate up the MAPFILE
for clarity into sections and use the INCLUDE parameter?  This should
make it a lot easier to follow some of the cartography settings, but
maybe I'm making too much of it.  I was wondering if this might be some
sort of performance hit as well, I doubt it though.

I'm also planning on doing some performance tuning, and separate up some
of the TIGER data into road classes for performance reasons.  I'm doing
this for a couple of reasons, but the community gets to reap the
results, so if there is interest, I'll keep going with the intention of
publishing the TIGER data in a performance enhanced version.  Otherwise,
I'll just move onto the Railroad, Parks, and water layers to complete
the look.

If anyone wants to help out after taking a look at the thresholding I
already have set up in the MapFile, it would be appreciated, we can pull
all these layers together into a single package for distribution.

Let me know your thoughts . . . 

bobb





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