Absolutely, Christopher - I'm a big admirer of the OpenLayers community, and the things you can do with it are impressive. Still, I haven't seen an implementation of an entire map in vector on the client side - examples such as this: http://openlayers.org/dev/examples/wfs-reprojection.html
...which are great, still use a pre-rendered tile base layer. What I'm hoping is that by sending *only* vector data, mappers can completely design maps from the ground up with their own GSS stylesheets. One of the great parts about OSM is that it tracks authorship of map data, as well as timestamps for when it was produced. But the tile system (a feat of engineering, of course, to serve tiles for many zoom levels for the entire earth, rendered on-demand) is not an ideal solution for producing different kinds of maps - it's best for a single canonical map, especially with respect to the caching systems. ITO has done some great work on this front with their tile-based stylesheets, here: http://www.itoworld.com/static/osmmapper There are many ways to design maps, so this kind of adaptability is great. But another challenge with tile systems is that dynamic and changing data like moving trains, clouds, tides, crowds of people, must be done in overlays. As reporting tools improve, we may see more and more real-time data - bird migrations, tracking the Boston Marathon, etc - through voluntary reporting. You can see some of this kind of mapping information in Josh Levinger's project, Virtual Gaza - http://virtualgaza.media.mit.edu/ The above uses OpenLayers, so definitely there are a lot of powerful tools to be found there. I'm hoping Cartagen can be a different approach to the problem, one that may open up opportunities for dramatically varied map designs. I just created a Google Code project here: http://code.google.com/p/cartagen Best, Jeff On Sun, Apr 26, 2009 at 12:48 PM, Christopher Schmidt < [email protected]> wrote: > On Sat, Apr 25, 2009 at 11:09:39AM -0400, Jeffrey Warren wrote: > > I'm working on a Javascript map renderer, non tile-based. > > Although this is somewhat unrelated, I just want to comment here that > OpenLayers provides a non-tile based client side vector map renderer as > well. Although it is not likely to be optimized for the same use case as > this is, I wanted to make anyone who cared aware that this type of > functionality has been in OpenLayers (and steadily improving in many > ways) for multiple years now. > > Included is: > > * The Ability to read many different goedata formats (KML, GeoRSS, > GeoJSON, WKT) > * The ability to render in Canvas, SVG, or VML > * THe ability to interact with drawn features -- click to select, > change color on hover, etc. > * THe ability to draw in the map, adding new data, > * Styling based on SLD, or Javascript-generated style descriptions > in a simlar vein to SVG. > * etc. etc. > > Best Regards, > -- > Christopher Schmidt > MetaCarta >
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