What is World Wide Map?
A bit of history.
World Wide Map is an initiative of Muze and Carp Technologies. It has its roots back to 1999, when Muze developed an Internet Map control for a local (dutch) website. It appeared to us then that using maps on the internet should be easier than it was. Not only where maps prohibitively expensive, costing many thousands per quarter for relatively small usages, but the available tools and map controls were cumbersome, slow and counter-intuitive.
We developed an alternative map browse control using more advanced JavaScript techniques, which did most geo calculations on the client side, reducing the geoserver to just spitting out predefined tiles of the complete map. The first version still relied on server side processing to insert markers in the tiles, and to create client-side click maps, old browsers with limited or no support for 'layers' where still with us then. Later versions improved on this approach by using new DOM based techniques to layer information over the map client-side, so that the server was nothing more than a static image server.
To speed up navigation over the map, we used a new layered approach even for tiles, blowing up lower resolution tiles and placing them behind the high resolution tiles. This was made possible by keeping track of image loads on the way, and making a client side stack of tiles to load. By skipping tiles which hadn't been loaded in time, and giving higher priority to low resolution tiles, we allowed the user to skip over vast areas of the map very fast, only filling in the details when the user stopped for a moment.
The main problem with all of this remained the high costs of using maps online, there was nothing we could do about that, so sales of the system remained limited. In the beginning of 2003 we came up with a possible answer to this problem. Why not create a single tile server, with a javascript library which implemented all the map navigation, like panning, zooming, adding markers, etc. Anyone could then use this server for their own purposes, by including the javascript map engine on their own website. This required just one thing, a map provider willing to provide a map, and someone to foot the bill. We spent most of two years trying to get many different parties interested, and then Google Maps arrived.
Is World Wide Map obsolete?
Or where do we go from here?
When Google Maps arrived on the scene our first reaction was disappointment, someone else got there first. But after careful consideration, we now think Google Maps is a blessing. World Wide Map was always about more than just the delivery mechanism, the client-side map control. It was also about making it easy to publish geo data and combining data from different providers, at low or no cost. And while all kinds of mash-ups have arrived using Google Maps to display all kinds of data, there are almost no standards for providing the required data, so each mash-up is its own island of data. Geo data is still stored in all kinds of proprietary formats and databases. This is where we can still make a difference. Even more so now we are no longer held back by huge costs for simply displaying the data on a map.
There are still some tools we made, which aren't currently publically available, or are likely to become so soon. The most important tool is the Location-Extractor, build by Carp Technologies. This tool allows you to extract address information from all kinds of free-form content.
Recognizing the fact that we can't compete with companies like Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, we've removed our map control software from this site. Instead we will focus on collecting and sharing links to current developments in opening up the world of mapping. We'll start a blog here shortly, with opinions, new and old developments and perhaps suggestions. We'll also build some demo's using the current crop of browser-based map controls. In the mean time we'll provide a list of links to what we think are the most important sites currently.
September 15th, 2006
Auke van Slooten
Muze
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