by ATSupport » Wed Mar 03, 2004 9:54 pm
I meant the development cost. The price of commercial products (ESRI, Mapquest) implies how much it costs to develop such a system.
To build our own map server, the only choice seems to be the open source 'MapServer' project (
http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu), plus the TIGER/LINE map data. MapServer doesn't automatically support TIGER AFAIK. Even if it does, TIGER data is low efficient for real-time query - imagine dealing with 4GB data (whole US) for each geocoding. I am not sure how long it takes to set up a server based on 'MapServer' and TIGER, a few months? 1 year? Additionally TIGER data is likely out of date because it updates every a couple of years. The latest update was in 2000. (NavTech updates every few months).
Buying map data from NavTech or GDT is not practical for us for the same reason of cost.
All in all, hope you get a picture of the situation.
I meant the development cost. The price of commercial products (ESRI, Mapquest) implies how much it costs to develop such a system.
To build our own map server, the only choice seems to be the open source 'MapServer' project ([url]http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu[/url]), plus the TIGER/LINE map data. MapServer doesn't automatically support TIGER AFAIK. Even if it does, TIGER data is low efficient for real-time query - imagine dealing with 4GB data (whole US) for each geocoding. I am not sure how long it takes to set up a server based on 'MapServer' and TIGER, a few months? 1 year? Additionally TIGER data is likely out of date because it updates every a couple of years. The latest update was in 2000. (NavTech updates every few months).
Buying map data from NavTech or GDT is not practical for us for the same reason of cost.
All in all, hope you get a picture of the situation. :)