Topographic Map Services
As wonderful as some of the image-based systems are (such as Google Earth), topographic maps are still extremely useful. In states which don't have high res imagery, they're essential.
Several commercial vendors offer web-based USGS topo maps. The two leading vendors are TopoZone.com and MapCard.com.
The two services are pretty comparable. TopoZone offers slightly better indexing. It supports wildcard searches for feature names, whereas with MapCard you need to enter the complete feature name to get a hit. On the other hand, MapCard’s UI and displays are a little better. Each service offers different levels of service for different prices. MapCard is currently a little cheaper. (Needless to say, it’s the one I subscribed to, and the one you’ll see demoed here).
The main advantages of the commercial services are:
-
Indexing by feature name – for example you can enter “Yokum Brook” and it will tell you where it is in longitude and latitude.
-
Full US coverage
-
A few nifty tools (we’ll demo them), including the ability to click on a point and get its longitude and latitude (very useful integrating with Google Earth).
Finding a map starts on a search page as shown below You can enter a search term such as we’ve done here, e.g. “yokum brook” in the state of MA. Alternatively, you can enter a longitude and latitude.
In this case, we’ll enter a text search. The system immediately returns an answer:
Then, by clicking on the search results, we end up with a map view:
One nice tool of the MapCard system is the ability to plot waypoints, and see the exact longitude and latitude. This makes it very easy to use it in conjunction with Google Earth.
© 2006 All Rights Reserved by Green Drake Services, Inc.