Hi,
I work for an LBS based company, we have our own proprietary rendering
engine for producing maps, and we work mainly with data from Navteq and
Teleatlas. Presently our rendering engine is behind the competition in
terms of visual quality (we have a bad support for antialiasing, label
names with both native and transliterate names are missing, and so on).
Introducing new features in our current rendering architecture would
require quite a lot of coding and re-engineering, so we are looking for
alternative renderers, possibly open sourced. During this research
project I came across Mapserver, and it seems it would suit our needs in
terms of high quality rendering and customization.
However, there are still some open issues, mainly questions, I'd like to
ask.
In regards to rendering:
1) Is there any way to align labels in different encondings for the same
city? I mean something like writing ??????? and /Moskvá /vertically
aligned, like on Google Maps.
2) Is there any plan to support 2.5D rendering for buildings?
In regards to working with high loads of data:
1) We render our maps from data provided by vendors like Navteq, and
they have a lot of details and features. Is there anyone working in the
same field, who could share some of his experience?
2) Is it more efficient to work with PostGis/Oracle Spatial or with
shapefiles? I suppose the former would be faster, since shapefiles
provided by Navteq would require about 100gigs for Europe only, just to
store the data.
3) In regards to the hardware, I reckon we would need at least one
workstation dedicated to rendering. Currently we are hosting our
rendering service on dual Xeon (quad core), with 16G of ram and SAS
arrays of hard disks, would one server like this be ok or would it be
better to have more machines, especially if planning to use RDBMS to
hold the data? I'm asking this because with currently work with detailed
data from Europe, North and South America, so it's quite a lot of stuff :)
Thanks in advance for any feedback.
Regards,
Paolo Crosato
--
Paolo Crosato
Ubiest SPA
http://www.ubiest.com
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