On Thu, Feb 19, 2009 at 12:11 PM, Christopher Schmidt < [email protected]> wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 19, 2009 at 08:31:43AM -0600, David Raasch wrote: > > Then, this morning, I stumbled upon the OpenLayers site. > > > > At first, I was quite excited that it seemed somebody was offering a > mapping > > API for free! But then, I started reading a bit more and it looks like, > > although the application is free, some of the various layer data sources > are > > free for business use and some are not ???? Is that correct? > > OpenLayers does not provide any data. It is the equivilant of the > "Javascript"/"API" portion of the Google Maps API -- the part without > the tiles. However, because it allows you to use different data > providers quickly and easily, you can start by using free, low quality > data sources -- and if the budget comes through next year, you can just > swap in a Google Layer later. > > > With regards to what sort of layers I'm looking for, well, I think we'd > just > > like some sort of terrain / satellite view and then accurate street maps. > > "Accurate street maps" can cost a lot of money. However, > http://openstreetmap.org/ is making a freely usable world map that you > could use for this purpose. Depending on how crucial it is that you have > the same quality as something like Google has, OSM may be a free > alternative -- and if it's not, well, it is a wiki after all. Get those > clients to go out and map their town. > > NASA provides 15m satellite data for the world that is relatively > usable, called "Landsat", which may be sufficient if all you want is a > high level overview. > > Regards, > -- > Christopher Schmidt > MetaCarta > _______________________________________________ > Users mailing list > [email protected] > http://openlayers.org/mailman/listinfo/users > If you are looking for help bringing OSM's data as a nicely styled base layer into OpenLayers, you may want to check out this blog post: http://blog.geoserver.org/2009/01/30/geoserver-and-openstreetmap/ At the bottom of the post is a link to an example that shows how to use OpenLayers to pull in the layer from a public WMS (GeoServer) that is cached with GeoWebCache. -- Sebastian Benthall OpenGeo - http://opengeo.org
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