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<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial'>Wow, that was a bomb shell post. To me it seems that the
only real benefit would be the ability to integrate tiles from Google, Yahoo
etc and then drop our own data on top without using the crude method currently
being used by Google Maps hackers. But I pose the question; how many people
currently using/developing ka-map would even want to do that? <o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial'><o:p> </o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial'>The world of web mapping as I see it has two camps: The
first camp which for lack of a better label I will call the ‘GIS Camp’,
these are people who are developing web maps usually as part of a larger GIS
related project and using all their own datasets. And the second is what I
would call the ‘non-GIS camp’, people who are interested in web
mapping solution to display, hotels in a city, or all their stores in the
country and will use whatever datasets that they can find. For me ka-map is
very much geared up for the first camp and so are most of the contributors from
what I can see, whilst OpenLayers (I’m might be wrong) seems to be
looking to please the second camp by producing Google style interface (no
scale, no legend, no query tools etc). <o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial'><o:p> </o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial'>I have been impressed with the resolve of the main ka-map
developers/community so far to avoid taking ka-map down the road of being
merely a Google Maps emulator despite knowing that this would probably increase
the popularity of the system 10 fold. I feel although it would increase long
term popularity and exposure in the long term going down this track would
stifle development as the guys in the GIS field who maybe turn out ten web maps
a year slowly disappear and are replaced by developers looking for quick fix
mapping solutions for commercial sites who in my experience from other open
source projects will tend to take a more grab and run approach and contribute
very little.<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial'><o:p> </o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial'>If this is the way that ka-map has to go then maybe it would
be worth starting the new development with the aim to have two release
versions? The first could be an application geared towards the GIS camp with
full functionality and the extra performance hit that goes along with that and the
second could be a faster slimmed down Ka-map/OpenLayers Lite which would aim to
be a Google Maps type system. <o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
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