ljegou

Yep, but not vice versa :)

It's not cartographic design, it's styling (waaaay different).

Yes OpenLayers is the leading OS project for web maps, in my opinion. PostGIS/PostgreSQL DB backend is also used often to offer writing/modification, besides WFS-T. But to draw/digitize the spatial data, it could be more practical to use a desktop software, instead of a web app.

Any geographical information software (GIS) offer tools to create spatial data, from scratch or by copying / digitalizing sources.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_geographic_information_...

Then you can style them, and design a map, using vector drawing software like Inkscape.

Perhaps a scale could be useful on the zoomed map... It's isolation, so distance, that we are talking about.

(A grumpy cartographer).

As a complement, here is an article about China university admission development program:

http://www.espacestemps.net/document8305.html

The context is clearly different, but the contrast seemed interesting.

An excerpt:

"The reasoning behind this decision was economic. The government reckoned that every million new graduates would raise China’s gdp by 2%. Not only did university graduates make skilled employees and attract higher incomes, but education itself was an engine of economic growth."

Not with the Google Maps Data API : http://code.google.com/intl/us/apis/maps/documentation/mapsd... Other overlay apps/mashups are using datasets for the most incomparably smaller than the base map data.

Plus, the tiles are rendered once, no need for heavy calculations on-demand.

The Mercator projection is useful to navigators on high seas, but nowadays, that's just irrelevant. De-zoom and look at the size of Groenland or Antarctica to see :)

I got apple care for my macbook air (1st gen) and it was nearly worth it when the power transformer broke. I bough apple care for my laptops.