Excellence Through Mediocrity: google maps, telcontar drill down server

dali at the mall
Originally uploaded by jhc.

via jon udell, some interesting information on the google maps backend, telcontar's drill down server:

Why is the Drill Down Server so fast? "At the heart of Telcontar we have a new spatial data access method that's fundamentally different than how everyone else has tried to organize spatial data," Fennell noted. "We reorganize data from all sources into our format called Rich Map Format (RMF). We have ten patents granted and another 21 filed in this area. A subtle difference - we built our engine and our access method was designed to do high performance route calculations. Traditional GIS systems do geometry and attributes well so you can print a map, and make beautiful maps very efficiently. If you try to use that geometry information to calculate a route you discover you need to have all the topology and term restrictions embedded in the database and it becomes a more difficult engine to solve. So we built an engine to do routing, not necessarily thematic maps, although we have the ability to manage that map layer underneath very well and can put points of interest on top of a map. We do routing well, and do it in an architecture that is stateless, so any user can go to any server and have that query processed."