I have a bit of experience in GIS data and applications. Okay, a lot. Sean is absolutely right about the rarity and high price of street maps, not to mention the legal rights problems which can drag in Queens and Kings.
The first question to answer is: what is the necessary accuracy? If you're not routing ambulances then there may be adequate data available from public sources. Availability varies tremendously by country, even by internal divisions, but streets are always changing, hence more difficult to obtain. If street level geocoding is needed, one approach would be to take advantage of Google or Yahoos geocoding APIs. Would work for a limited (but large) number of hits/day, and for a non-commercial application. For basic context like major roads, landmarks, postal code or political boundaries, data may well be available for free or the cost of bashing them into a useful shape. These data also have the advantage of smaller file sizes. Hope this helps. -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Sean Moss-Pultz Sent: Tuesday, November 28, 2006 10:25 AM To: Marcus Bauer; [email protected] Subject: [Spam?] Re: google earth - [was: Re: Another simple GPS+GPRS idea] Importance: Low On 11/27/06 8:16 PM, "Marcus Bauer" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > You may ask Sean about availability of maps for the Neo1973 (a quick > search in the ML-archives gives no hits). Mapping data is actually really difficult. There are only two providers worldwide: * Navitec * TeleAtlas And they are really expensive. We have some commercial software lined up that we could sell, but I'm not too excited at anything at this point. Hopefully we can come up with something free together. -Sean _______________________________________________ OpenMoko community mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openmoko.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/community NOTICE: This e-mail message is for the sole use of the intended recipient(s) and may contain confidential and privileged information of Motricity. Any unauthorized review, use, disclosure or distribution is prohibited. If you are not the intended recipient, please contact the sender by reply e-mail and destroy all copies of the original message. _______________________________________________ OpenMoko community mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openmoko.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/community
