3/9     \_ I wanna make the China version of Yahoo Maps / Mapquest.
           Anyone here has any experience?  eg. Worked at Navtech?
           We can start with like Beijing and move on from there.
           \_ In Taiwan right now, and talked to friends from the mainland
              regards to LBS service.  The main issue is that, unlike USA,
              which essentially gave out GIS map of entire country for free
              (TIGER db), in both mainland China and Taiwan, GIS Maps has to be
              purchased.  I am less familiar with what is going on in the
              mainland, but in Taiwan, first, the government actually holds
              copyright on these maps, secondly, the government impose a very
              restrictive license on how the map can be used, and charge a
              very handsome sum for "value-added redistribution."
              Second issue is less difficult.  There is simply no good Chinese
              parser out there to tokenize addresses.
                 \_ pain in the butt, nothing more, and there are issue of
                    chinese literal versus arabic numerals, full-width
                    latin characters, half-width characters, etc, etc.
                    to get things right, it requires some tedious work.
                    The main issue lies upon the avaliablity of GIS maps.
              In taiwan, life get even more complicated because maps are
              controlled by several different government agencies.

              The main obsticle is that Chinese people on both strait treat
              map as some sort of military secret, and very reluctant to
              release them to civilian use.

              If you are interested in this kind of things, email me, as I
              am in the process of getting street maps of Taipei to play
              with (which going to cost me $150 USD just for personal use).
                                        -kngharv
              \_ You mean in Taiwan tourists can't buy somthing like "Map of
                 Taipei" at a bookstore for a few bucks?
              \_ I don't get the tokenize address part.  Just let the
                 user enter the address as seperate fields.  Take my
                 aunt's address (using commie romanization):
                 tai2 bei3 (taipei city), xin1 dian4 (subdivision), zhong1
                 zheng4 lu4 (road), wu3 hao4 (number)
                 If they write it all together, sure, but if it's entered
                 in seperate fields or with a delimiter, I don't see
                 what's the difficulty.
                 \_ apparently neither did the people who already made it
                    work. http://www.taiwan-map.com/Address.asp
        \_ this is cute and all but what is your business model?