I need something like Google-maps, usable on a commercial project. Can I use GoogleMaps? What if they should change the terms of service? Would I be better with somethin elike Open Street Map?
I need full coverage for North America, but also for Europe and Asia.
Which might be best? Thanks
I think to avoid using Google Maps based on concerns over changes to the terms of service would be a mistake. Google Maps is very well established and for Google to compromise the service in some way, would mean alienating a massive number of people, something Google is certainly not going to do.
From a technical standpoint, I talk about my reasons for using Google Maps here.
Google does not own the data, they are themselves licensees of Tele Atlas. This Wikipedia page has details about the deal, that may be enough to answer your question.
Yes, the terms could change anytime. Yes, perhaps what you want to do is already forbidden.
OpenStreetMap is not reliable enough yet for most uses. It's a great pastime though if you have a GPS and like this sort of thing (I do).
If you gave more details in your question someone would be able to provide a more specific answer.
Related
Is there any way to add a business with complete information (with address, geospatial location, categories, trading hours etc) to Google Places in a programmatic fashion?
We want to add new franchises to a listing of stores. Manual changes are too brittle, the bulk upload takes a long time to be confirmed and the standard Places API has only a very limited method on it. Am I missing something or is there no support for managing your own store listings via an API?
I don't think you're missing anything at this time. Support for that sort of thing is currently limited to what's documented at the link you provide, I believe.
The Places stuff is in the odd grey area where Google is kind of pushing it and promoting it, but also saying that it's just in Labs, it's just experimental, etc., so it may not have all the features you need.
There might be other ways to get your businesses into Google Maps, if your concern is Google Maps generally and not the Google Places stuff specifically. If they exist, they may have more fully featured API capabilities for updates. Or this might be a big dead end.
If this issue is closer to a big annoyance instead of a total dealbreaker, then the approach I'd recommend, if you can wait long enough, would be to implement what you can in the existing API, and keep an eye on the API docs to see if they add more capabilities in the coming months. Open a feature request for Places API in the issue tracker and maybe keep an eye on other features requests there, especially issue 2431.
I want to know how to read the traffic information from google map as here in the following image. Google only displays the traffic layer by red, green, and yellow lines. But how can an application identify the color and find out how much traffic there is between source and destination.
Visually users can see with their eyes and identify the colors but what about the application?
Google Maps API does not expose traffic data. Your best bet is probably to find a different solution for your traffic data. Microsoft MapPoint might meet your needs.
UPDATES to answer questions in comments:
Whether there is a free service may depend on what geographic area you are concerned with. I imagine (but don't know for certain) that there may be places where government entities make the data available. Or maybe not. Regardless, generally, no, you can't get this data for free. It is expensive and challenging to collect, and no doubt Google pays someone a substantial fee for the data (and is probably forbidden from distributing raw data).
Meanwhile, the data Yahoo! offers is completely different from Google's traffic data. Yahoo! provides information about accidents, road work, etc. Google's information has to do with the actual speed of vehicles on the roadway. As far as I know, Google does not provide that information with the Maps API.
In any event, Google's raw traffic data is unavailable to your application.
As always, what various services offer can and will change and this answer may not age well. But it is, to the best of my knowledge, accurate at the current time.
I am not sure whether this forum is appropriate for this question. But, I am dying for this information. The problem is certain parts of Google or Bing Map licenses does not allow me to use their map services/controls.
Is there any commercial map controls (atleast for U.S) similar to Google maps available?
Thanks in advance
There are many mapping solutions available that you can use, but the big problem that you have isn't actually the mapping software, it's the map source data. This is where the licensing actually comes into play because you usually have to source the map data from somewhere, and even Google maps have to purchase this mapping from somewhere - they then pass the cost of the license on to you. If you aren't too worried about 100% coverage, you might want to take a look at the OpenStreetMap project which is an open source project aiming to provide geographic data.
Anyway, if you want free software and you are using .NET, you can always download SharpMap. For an online solution, you could look into DeepEarth.
Alternatively, if you are looking to pay for a commercial solution, you might want to look into ESRI or MapInfo solutions.
ESRI has many products that perform similar functions, on both desktop and server.
I believe mapquest offers commercial licensing of their services & components.
Google Maps does have a commercial version, but it'll cost you.
Simple question, the answer may not be...
I'm going to be developing a web app (ASP.NET MVC) for a client. They have asked me for an opinion on whether to use Google Maps or Virtual Earth for providing a mapping solution.
Which would you go for and why? Or are there others you can recommend?
What else do you need to know?
Street view (or equivalent) won't be
necessary in the near future, but
one day it might.
The client wants to identify certain
mappable features, and beyond that
find these features when within a
specified distance.
What else should I be considering at a high level? Or my client?
Thank you in advance.
One of your major considerations needs to be licensing if this is for a commercial web site. You'll have to contact both Google and Microsoft for exact details and pricing, but there's plenty on the web that indicates it could cost you $10k to implement these solutions in production. They get you hooked on the rapid and easy development though!
My preference is for Google Maps, it just feels a bit slicker but I have developed some pretty good prototypes with the Virtual Earth SDK before.
I don't know if Microsoft are planning an equivalent to the StreetView feature so if that is on the requirements cards in the future then stick with Google.
Either of the technologies will allow you to search for geographic features in various ways - whether via region, street address or specific latitude + longitude. They also allow you to overlay your own images or draw lines, polygons etc.
Google Maps seems to have a wider user base (even though Microsoft were technically doing this stuff before Google got into it!), so you're likely to find more help out on the intarweb when implementing your solution than for Microsoft.
More info on Google Maps for Enterprise is located here:
http://www.google.com/enterprise/maps/map_info.html
You should be asking the client for a reasonably comprehensive list of requirements for the mapping solution. You've mentioned one - these "mappable features". Are there any others?
Once you've got the list you can then see which one provides the best fit and go with that.
If Street View is definitely on the horizon then you have to go with Google - or is it something that's just come up in conversation?
Having said that, for a little bit more effort you could write an abstraction layer that sits between your application and the mapping solution so that if the one you didn't choose provides a better fit in the future it would be easier to make the change. Though this does go against the Agile methodology (YAGNI).
Google maps in some region can serve traffic information showing the blocked roads and so on. I was wondering if there is any code example demonstrating how can I serve traffice information for my own region.
"Google Maps Hacks" has a hack, "Hack 30. Stay Out of Traffic Jams", on that.
You can also find out how to get U.S. traffic info from John Resig's "Traffic Conditions Data" article.
For your own data, you'll want to implement a custom tile overlay.
Google is mum on what source they use for their traffic data. You might contact them directly to see if they want to implement something for you, but my guess is that they'd simply refer you to their provider if they really wanted your data.
Keep in mind that traffic data is available for more than just the metropolitan areas, but Google isn't using it for a variety of reasons - one of the big reasons is that the entire tile set for the traffic overlay in areas with traffic tiles has to be regenerated every 15 minutes or so. It just doesn't scale.
So even if you managed to get your data in their flow, it likely won't be rendered.
-Adam
I found that googl has a class called GTrafficOverlay and this is based on extending the GOverlay class. Now, it is getting clearer that I am looking for an open implementation of the GTrafficOverlay