There’s just been a new release of MannGis, the Isle of Man Government Mapping site. The new release helps to address some of the issues that the previous version has and also starts to add some pretty stuff to make it more usable. The first release looked a bit dry, but this was mainly as we wanted to make the page as accessible as possible. Due to the fact that maps are largely graphical, we knew that certain classes of users will have problems using the site, but to mitigate this we wanted the site to work without Javascript. Now that this baseline as been achieved, we can start adding enhancements to make the site easier to use with normal browsers.

It’s an interesting space, because people sometime draw comparisons between MannGis and Google Maps, but really they are quite different, both in scope and in architecture. Google Maps has 2 layers, a photo layer and a street layer, while MannGis has a large number of these. Because of this, it’s very hard to provide comprehensive caching that can speed up the user experience. This, coupled with the fact that it’s really an enterprise system mean that we cannot match Google Map’s speed, but can provide a richer set of information.

There should be more exciting stuff coming out soon. In the meantime, I just wanted to congratulate the team who made it happen. Good work guys!

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Just picked up a post on Dan Karran’s blog that Google Maps is now showing street detail for the Isle of Man. It’s interesting how now there’s a whole selection of places starting to show this detail, including Cloudmade which is an interesting offering who source their data from OpenStreetMap.

I do like keeping my eye on the mapping scene, especially as I know the people involved with MannGIS, the government GIS initiative here in the Isle of Man. It’s always a good idea to see what other people are doing as it helps seed new idea for projects I’m working on and suggest cooperation that can increase value. Mapping is also one of those things I’m interested in just because of the usefulness that technology can provide in this space.

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