Mapping a route

I guess Nikhil should be writing this rather than me, cause he has done more work on this.

After having scrapped our initial idea of putting up a home page, we decided to figure out what was the epicentre of our application and do that instead. So we discussed this over a jog, and came up with the Route map itself as the epicentre of the application (yeah, it was obvious wasent it :-) ).

Anyways. India has not been mapped as well as some parts of the world. Rather let me put it this way. It has been mapped really well, but this information has not been made available to the aam-public due to various issue. Some people are trying to change all this. But looks like its going to take time, and were looking at getting this application up today (yeah, just a saying I guess. Dunno how long this will actually take)

We belted out out choices to display a route that a cyclist would take and came up with the following options
- Draw a map ourselves - Ugh.
- Use Google Maps (that too the satellite view, cause we dont have enough detail at the roads level)
- use the maps provided by eGovernments Foundation - These guys seem to be good and say that they will have an API soon.
- Buy a map of Bangalore and and mark a route on it and use it on the web page (either scan it or take a snap of the area) Some awesome detailed maps are available in book form, but then this will be infringement of copyright, and we really should not be doing this.
- Use photos at all landmarks and at every turning all along the route to show the route. But then this can be extremely user-unfriendly and a sure shot way of making sure that out application will have only 2 routes (the ones that Nikhil and I take to get to work :-) )
- Just describe the route for the time being.

well. There are a ton of options. And none of them look too promising at this point in time.

When we spoke about this last we had thought we would try taking a Bangalore map from the GIS department, just to get the site up and running.

But then there is still hope, was digging into the Google Maps API and it looks promising. Looking like with some Javascript and Google Map API and with the Satellite view we should be able to get something up and running.

Searching for the mojo lead me to a few interesting sites

eGovernments Transport - Bangalore Based company looking to give google some competition
OpenStreetMap - An Opensource initiative in the Mapping World
Mapki - Good Info on Google Maps
Google Maps V2 API
NASA World Wind Project - Have to check out more on this