[mapserver-users] Mapserver usage with commercial vendors data

[Paolo Crosato]

Hi,

I work for an LBS based company, we have our own proprietary rendering 
engine for producing maps, and we work mainly with data from Navteq and 
Teleatlas. Presently our rendering engine is behind the competition in 
terms of visual quality (we have a bad support for antialiasing, label 
names with both native and transliterate names are missing, and so on). 
Introducing new features in our current rendering architecture would 
require quite a lot of coding and re-engineering, so we are looking for 
alternative renderers, possibly open sourced. During this research 
project I came across Mapserver, and it seems it would suit our needs in 
terms of high quality rendering and customization.
However, there are still some open issues, mainly questions, I'd like to 
ask.

In regards to rendering:
1) Is there any way to align labels in different encondings for the same 
city? I mean something like writing ??????? and /Moskvá /vertically 
aligned, like on Google Maps.
2) Is there any plan to support 2.5D rendering for buildings?

In regards to working with high loads of data:
1) We render our maps from data provided by vendors like Navteq, and 
they have a lot of details and features. Is there anyone working in the 
same field, who could share some of his experience?
2) Is it more efficient to work with PostGis/Oracle Spatial or with 
shapefiles? I suppose the former would be faster, since shapefiles 
provided by Navteq would require about 100gigs for Europe only, just to 
store the data.
3) In regards to the hardware, I reckon we would need at least one 
workstation dedicated to rendering. Currently we are hosting our 
rendering service on dual Xeon (quad core), with 16G of ram and SAS 
arrays of hard disks, would one server like this be ok or would it be 
better to have more machines, especially if planning to use RDBMS to 
hold the data? I'm asking this because with currently work with detailed 
data from Europe, North and South America, so it's quite a lot of stuff :)

Thanks in advance for any feedback.

Regards,

Paolo Crosato

-- 

Paolo Crosato
Ubiest SPA
http://www.ubiest.com

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