GIS Map Creation

[NickCoons]

I'm working on building a geographical map for a particular area. My goal is to have all of the map data, including boundaries, lakes, mountains, cities, roads, etc., stored in a MySQL database. Then an image is drawn realtime depending on the zoom level and the are being viewed. So this will be a vector-based map.

I have access to the longitude and latitude data needed. I'm working on creating the outermost borders to create a general map, and then add more and more specific details.

I want to make this map as accurate as possible. I had planned on storing the boundaries as long/lat coordinates, which for some areas are not difficult because they are rectangular, so it only takes a few coordinates to hold that information.

Unfortunately, some of the areas are very jagged, so they will require many more coordinates (curves are created using very small straight lines chained together). So while creating these rectangular areas can be done by hand-typing in the coordinates, this is not time-efficient for the many more non-straight boundaries that the rest of the map will contain.

My first thought was to use a very large scanned-in version of the area, then create a program to set this image as the background, and I simply click on areas of the border where a keypoint needs to be located and it will mathematically generate the long/lat coordinates, then save those to the database. But I don't know how difficult this would be either.

Any suggestions on speeding up this process would be greatly appreciated!

[GeorgeGG]

If it's in the US have you checked:
http*//tiger.census.gov/cgi-bin/mapbrowse-tbl

Examples and instructions:
http*//tiger.census.gov/instruct.html

GGG

[sun818]

How about skipping rows from the long/lat data for an object using MOD? If the object data is greater than say 1,000 coordinates, skip every fourth row. If it is over 2,000 coordinates, then make it second row. The idea is to take a sample instead of using the entire data set for the object.

[NickCoons]

GeorgeGG,

Thanks for the suggestion.. I think I may go this route. I noticed on this site that they say this is experimental, and they make no claim as to the continuation of the project. But that was posted five years ago, so I think I'll take my chances :-).