January 6
Mapping APIs for Web Mapping
Posted by Ajay
|Eeny meeny miny moose…which mapping API do i choose??
I have been working for quite some time on a Proof of Concept for our GIS web mapping application. Currently our system has a basemap that has been superbly crafted by a good group of GIS engineers, we even have maps that are hill shaded, sounds cool dont it? Trust me it’s cooler than it sounds. Plus we render it using our custom WMS/WFS server with a Mapbuilder / OpenLayers client.
Anyhow, looks like some of our customers were enamored by Google maps (one of those things I call crowd-fluence , getting influenced by the crowd), looks like everyone around is using Google maps so they wanted to use google maps.
So there i was putting on my researcher’s pants, trying to provide a proof of concept for our customers adding a feature in our web application to allow them to switch between Google Maps, Yahoo Maps, Microsoft Virtual Earth and our own custom built basemaps.
In between these lines let me tell you Openlayers is one of those awesomest coolest client APIs that have helped developers like me to add a wooing factor to our open source web applications. Mapbuilder adds onto this to add a lot of useful functionality to OpenLayers in terms of widget. (Why it did not become very
popular i dont know, cause it is so easy to use along with an XML configuration file that allows us to add widgets quite so easily)
Anyhow in the process of my experiments, here are some things I came to realize.
- Yahoo road layer is by far the most coolest looking and of course it is very easy to read. Also it looks like it has built in geocoding which is awesomeness personified. But yahoo maps are not that well developed internationally. Another very cool thing about yahoo map is hillshading on their road basemap that google does not provide, although google’s terrain view is seperate from their map layer and is awesome.
- Google’s terrain view is really cool, but one unfortunate issue with Google map API is that it requires us to have a seperate API key for each machine, whereas Yahoo does not really put that kind of restrictions. But Google’s data is very accurate and up to date.
3. Microsoft’s virtual Earth in my opinion does not match either google or yahoo in terms of road map clarity but it does have a really clear satellite view, with a better color coordination. Also Microsoft’s road map view has lots more details for a given level as compared to google or yahoo which could be a blessing or a curse depending on how you look at it. Of course one thing that Microsoft maps DO NOT have which is really cool is they have NO ADS!! 
4. Of course there is a whole new open source initiative in the form of open street maps (http://www.openstreetmap.org/) that I think has some great potential. Although the level of clarity is not upto either google or yahoo, but they do offer you the benefit of being able to manage a lot of your own GIS data through GPS systems (and of course contribute some of the data collected back to the community). You can even export basemaps so as to work your GIs application without an internet connection, that should prove a boon to many GIS enthusiasts.
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