Thursday, 3 December 2009

Introducing Atlas of Norway (norgesatlas.info)

Great news! On December 1st, the Norwegian Mapping Authority (NMA) launched a series of map services. The best and most detailed maps of Norway are now freely available. You can browse the maps in my new web application: norgesatlas.info (Atlas of Norway). The following map layers are fetched from NMA:
  • Sjøkart = Nautical chart
  • Topografisk = Topographic map (very nice!)
  • Fylker og kommuner = Administrative boundaries
  • Sjødybder = Sea depths
  • Sjøgrenser = Maritime boundaries
Below are a few examples depicting Foldøy island - 1 square km of beauty in southwest Norway.

Google Satellite, highest resolution available.

Google Streets, highest level of detail available.

Nautical chart from NMA.

Topographic map from NMA.

Topographic map and sea depths from NMA.

Large scale topographic map from NMA.

Grazing land on Foldøy.

NMA maps can be accessed as a Web Map Service (WMS) or as cached map tiles for fast retrieval. Both Google Maps and Bing Maps tiling schemes are supported, as well as WMS-C. Limits are 300 requests per end-user per day for the WMS and 10000 request per day for the cached version (Terms of Use).

According to this blog post, the NMA map services are based on open source software: MapServer, PostGIS and GeoWebCache. Norgesatlas.info is based on OpenLayers, ExtJS and GeoExt, - great tools to build web mapping applications.


3 comments:

  1. Unknown3 December 2009 at 15:10

    Hello.

    All your web applications have great functions.

    However why do you support to import OGC WMS and WFS, and GeoJSON? For WMS and GeoJSON's data is more light-weight than KML's.

    Although I have never seen usage example of WMS on Google Earth plug-in in stead of Google Earth client supporting this protocol.


    Regards.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Unknown4 December 2009 at 10:16

    Please have a look at Kart i skolen which also includes a lot of thematic overlays for instance geology, energy resources, oil pipes and oil fields, fisheries etc. It's developed as a free educational resource.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Unknown4 December 2009 at 14:24

    @h_ono:
    I think cached map tiles (e.g. WMS-C og TMS) are the best way to distribute raster data to JavaScript-based applications. GeoJSON or other JSON formats are probably the most efficient way to distribute vector data. The main bottleneck is poor vector handling in web browsers. HTML 5 looks promising.

    @Terje:
    Kart i skolen (http://kartiskolen.no) looks nice!

    ReplyDelete