Mike, Greg & Barry: Thanks for the suggestions ... I'll try both Mike's (discussing it here) and Greg's (try again to find a Premier sales rep) approaches on the grounds that they both are useful ... although I apologize for posting it here since this could quickly stop being relevant to the Maps API per se.
I teach histology (microscopic anatomy) at a medical school. In the teaching lab, the medical students traditionally have looked through a microscope to view specimens mounted on microscope slides. Over the last few years, there has been a move digitize the entire microscopic specimen (as viewed in the microscope), and then have the students/doctors access the digitized image. The digitized image is essentially a map of the tissue, and the panning and zooming (and putting markers on particular locations) is essentially the same as is done on a Google map. The Maps API seems like it would be wonderful tool for accessing and displaying the digitized images. A group at New York University has already implemented a version of this; see: http://cloud.med.nyu.edu/virtualmicroscope/ , and http://code.google.com/p/virtualmicroscope/ , and http://www.biomedcentral.com/1472-6920/11/4 . This principal "terms of service" (TOS) issue is that section 9.1 of the TOS requires free public access to the API implementation, but it is unclear whether this requires just public access to the microscope viewer (i.e. the HTML page with the Maps API embedded), which wouldn't be an issue, or whether this would also require public access to the entire image database. The TOS envisions that the Maps API would be used with the Google Maps database, and doesn't seem to address the question of a non-Google map database. Some of the microscope slides would be used for examination purposes and wouldn't be accessible even to our students except under special conditions, and some of the annotation overlays would only be appropriate for our students and not for the general public. So the question is whether we would be violating the TOS if we had part of the database freely accessible to the public, but also had our students using the Maps API to access a part of the database which was only available on our password-protected intranet? Probably would be easiest if there was a Google person to sort this out, but any ideas or comments would be welcome. Thanks! - - Jim -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Google Maps JavaScript API v3" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/google-maps-js-api-v3?hl=en.
