ARCHITECTURE
The Digital Atlas map server architecture is highly modular which makes it suitable for deployment in a wide variety of configurations such as client-server, web ASP and thick client.
The map server can be deployed as a PC Client application where the whole solution (client, server, map data etc) is deployed on a single machine, or as a web server providing web only maps where the map data rendering engines are located on the server and only the web browser is on the client machine. Alternatively the architecture can be divided into a hybrid client – server solutions where most of the GIS complexities is located on the server side while the user centric features such as navigation, rendering, pan, and zoom are implemented on the client.
Digital Atlas can support many different types of display devices, which include mobiles phones, PDA’s, PC’s, and navigation devices. Digital Atlas provides free client side reference code which can be used and extended to for your own application, or simply used as an example pattern on how to create a client application. The map layers, size and rendering quality options can be tailored to meet the needs of the client display capability. Road navigation and route optimization is supported through the routing engine.
To achieve high performance routing a 64 bit machine is required to ensure the huge number of routing alternatives can be considered and measured in high speed before selecting the optimum paths. Routing between two geographic locations through a road map with many millions of road segments requires a high performance architecture to ensure the optimum solution is selected. For this reason our routing solution can only be deployed on high end machines. To support low end clients such as GPS enabled mobile phones for in vehicle navigation, the routing not only selects the optimum route but is able to deliver a corridor of road segments to ensure even a simple client can continuously navigate and automatically re-calculate alternative solutions.
Geocoding services are provided within the Digital Atlas map server to convert geographical coordinates expressed as latitude and longitude to map feature references such as street, address, post code, town, city country, point of interest etc. The geocoder can also convert map features back into geographic coordinates, which is useful for searching for a particular item and locating it on the map. The Digital Atlas geocoder is very fast and accurate. Map matching is a special aspect of the geocoder which is designed to snap a series of linked coordinates to navigable segments, such as roads and paths. This is particularly useful for telematics applications requiring to generate reports based on vehicle journeys, or for displaying the route in a navigation device, or for road user charging.
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