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? |