5x12 pentomino tiling
«

Low Bandwidth Mapping

»

I've been working on ways to render the maps we draw for our walks on WalkLakes which both avoids using the Ordnance Survey OpenSpace server and the licensing restrictions that implies and also reducing the data bandwidth involved, especially when displaying our walks on mobile devices.

After a couple of days wrestling with it I've now got a result. This is a map taken from the mobile version of our walk 'To Force Crag Mine - a Coledale Low Round'. The map itself comes from our OpenMaps server with both a GPX file (which defines the blue track) and a KML file (which defines the start signpost icon and the waypoints) rendered on it. The whole thing is rendered server side and sent to the browser as a PNG, typically of about 50KB. Compare this to the best part of 1MB of JavaScript to generate the interactive maps on our normal walk pages.

I think this technology has a lot of potential and now I'm wondering who I can sell it to.

Tags: maps, WalkLakes Written 20/12/12

Comment on this article

« »
I am currently reading:

A History of Women in 101 Objects by Annabelle Hirsch Game On by Janet Evanovich

(?)
Word of the Day:
polity