Forum Moderators: open
What's that leave?
There are only two maps listed for the BVI. One is pretty good and the other is plain awful.
I thought the additional categories in DMOZ was a stroke of genius on their part and did the maps with the thought that it would provide great additional info for my customers and at the same time, give me an additional DMOZ listing.
Its a shame DMOZ haven't followed through with adding sites to these categories. It could have been much better than MapQuest. Oh well.
What's that leave?
Well..........
from CGRER NetSurfing:
[cgrer.uiowa.edu...]
from Stanford University:
[www-sul.stanford.edu...]
from the fine folks at The NASA/JPL Imaging Radar Home Page
[southport.jpl.nasa.gov...]
Color Landform Atlas of the United States
[fermi.jhuapl.edu...]
Historical Maps from David Rumsey:
[davidrumsey.com...]
Duke U. Perkins Library Public Docs & Maps - Maps & GIS
[docs.lib.duke.edu...]
Geography and Map Division Homepage, Library of Congress
[lcweb.loc.gov...]
Map Machine @ nationalgeographic.com
[nationalgeographic.com...]
Maps On Us
[mapsonus.com...]
Oddens' Bookmarks.
[oddens.geog.uu.nl...]
The American Experience - Nuclear Blast Mapper
[pbs.org...]
There's Autopilot too:
[freetrip.com...]
I hope these have been of some help.
Pendanticist.
I hope these have been of some help.
:)
Has a second bad habit beyond WebmasterWorld. ;)
Pendanticist.
Also, quite a few government agencies provide interactive maps from GIS data with ESRI's ArcIMS; some use MapInfo. Local government data tends to have higher precision and accuracy than state or federal because of the smaller areas covered-- it might be worth searching by county or city if you're interested in a particular area. One problem with IMS is that the interface is typically layed out like a GIS application, which is pretty difficult for most people to understand and use.
In any case, I think it's unlikely you'll find maps online that are very readable-- the best maps are custom-designed for the display size, view, and purpose. National Geographic does a good job customizing maps for screen viewing but they (at least the ones I've seen) aren't automatically generated, and they look good mainly because NG emphasizes background information like shaded relief, limiting detailed overlays like roads and labels. Interactive mapping software attempts to enable customization by size and view, but maps are just too complex and variable to customize using programmed rules and thresholds.
The main reason online maps look clunky, though, is that screen resolution is too coarse to display the detail a map is capable of portraying-- maps viewed on screen just can't match maps in print. IMO, the best you can hope for from an interactive map is a one that is useful for a reference but not necessarily easy or pleasant to read. Not to say Mapblast, Yahoo or MapQuest couldn't do a better display job with some tweeking and larger display space, but the medium itself is severely limited IMO.
