China, Hongkong, Taiwan - The Greater China Desk

China, Hongkong, Taiwan - The Greater China Desk

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  • Cornelius Mueller
    Cornelius Mueller    Premium Member   Group moderator
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    China's Map World - hopefully a work in progress
    The State Bureau of Surveying and Mapping (SBSM) officially unveiled the free online map service on Thursday:

    http://www.tianditu.cn/ or http://www.chinaonmap.cn/

    The initial result id rather disappointing, so far. The service lacks features which should be at least equal or superior to Google Earth, in order to become successful. Resolution lacks sadly, for most of the service, even in China, and access (from within China) is sluggish, to say the least (I have no problem to access Google Earth resp. Google Maps from Shenzhen).

    Maps are available in Chinese, without transcription, and this means another problem due to information overload: Place-names and markers can't be switched off or selected (at least I didn't figure out, how to do that so far, in case it's possible), which, combined with the low resolution for most places means the maps get cluttered. There is, without doubt, a lot of information available already, but it's quite difficulty to access. Other information, like National Road numbers etc., are missing.

    Maps outside China in general are of too low resolution altogether to be meaningful at all, there are other services (NASA, Microsoft) which give much better results, in case somebody doesn't want to use any of Google's services.

    Quite a start for the SBSM, but still needs a lot of work and the release could be a bit premature - people might be put off, given the present performance.

    Cornelius Mueller



    http://www.sinolandquality.com
    • 24 Oct 2010, 06:26 am