Geography problems

[Tom]

Its worth looking at the ESRI (http://www.esri.com/) website, and then following the left navbar links under Create A Map to to see what is possible re delivery of GIS (Geographical Information Systems) over a mapserver. One of the basic geoprocessing functions is to search for the points within a circle. Search Engines could do this when they move on to local searches, though I do not know how they would obtain locational co-odinates. Maybe they will ask businesses to supply postcodes instead. I'm sure James is right about Estate Agents stretching the gum.

Geoprocessing puts an additional burden on a server but sites like Maporama (http://www.maporama.com/share/) and Multimap (http://www.multimap.com/) seem to have few problems. I think these sites make most of their money, as Google used to, by licensing their technology to other firms. They also have some adverts and sponsored links. I made a lot of use of Maporama last year to obtain town plans and north points and scales. If you have to find a hotel in a foreign city it is great to have a xerox of a map in your pocket, centered on the exact building with your bed.

Now for a question: about 3 years ago I had the addresses of several websites which produced 'maps' of hyperlinks. They showed the selected URL in the centre and a pattern of hyperlinks spreading outward, like a map of a galaxy. I have now lost the addresses. Has anyone seen anything like this?

[David]

Tom, you recently pointed us in the direction of www.kartoo.com (http://www.kartoo.com) - is that the sort of thing you mean?

[Tom]

Kartoo is like the sites I remember but not so good. Kartoo only show about half a dozen sites. I used to have a programme which mapped external links in the same manner as the View>Hyperlinks function in Frontpage.

[Terry]

I am a fan of multimap and have used it for a few years now. It has a useful feature that allows you to insert a "how to find us" map into a webpage. It even will give you aerial photos of some locations!

Terry