If I may pick a nit or two:
From: "Mark Korver" <mark@aruke.com>
> The smaller the screen the more difficult the map "authoring" and of
> course a postage size map can only really help you the last leg of
> journey. To do this you need to have appropriate map content. In this
> case that pretty much means road centers rather than width and also
> label data that you can dynamically place. This means not static label
> data.
> [snip]
> Also, any dynamic map rasterization has to deal with the Unisys LZW
> patent issue.
Everything you know is wrong. ;-) But seriously....
I think if you're talking about negotiating a route from a single map
at a single scale, no distortions, much of the above is true. However,
I've always admired how the Japanese schematize navigation information
on flyers and such, where space is at a premium. I could read
virtually no Japanese when I first came here, but nevertheless
found these maplets surprisingly useful. They play fast and
loose with distances but keep street widths to an approximately
correct ratio as a guide. Personally, I find single-pixel-width
road-lines maddeningly ambiguous, and would prefer to trade
away strict geometric accuracy in other distances. (For those
not Japan-savvy: street widths here go from boulevard to
goat-path in width, with lots of goat-paths branching off
even from boulevards.)
As for screen-size as an obstacle:
Most of us aren't reading maps just to read maps, we're reading
maps to actually get somewhere, from somewhere. I'd rather
have a sequence of 5+ tiny well-schematized maps at several
different scales, marking out only a few landmarks, than pore
over the whole enchilada every time. Put this in a highly
usable iAppli and you're going to see an awful lot of cops
with far less to do every day.
This requires, of course, a fair amount of customization for
those specific destinations. However, a great many destinations
have already been nicely schematized in promotional materials
whose design has already been paid for. Being schematic, they
lend themselves nicely to vectorization and/or high bitmap
compression (perhaps in some format that isn't patent-
encumbered, as LZH is.) Being for promotional purposes, it
shouldn't be hard to get the destination operators to fax these
maplets to your FAX server, for later slicing and dicing and
serving.
For "how to get to a random address", of course, or for
car navigation, there is no fully-adequate substitute for a
pannable, zoomable, nicely-scaled digital map product.
Still, for "how to get on foot and by train to a place quite a
few people go to," the engineering need not, to my mind,
be so high-end and intelligent. When the devil is in the
details, it's better to get those details from people who
are giving the data away anyway, out of self-interest,
than it is to buy it from cartographic database providers
who, by the very nature of the problem, can never give
you full accuracy anyway.
-michael turner
leap@gol.com
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Received on Sat Sep 29 11:30:53 2001