What’s that new tab on the site menu?

Submitted: Tuesday, Nov 05, 2013 at 18:07
ThreadID: 105000 Views:2519 Replies:1 FollowUps:4
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As the more observant ones of you have already noticed, our site menu changed today.... In between Treks and EOTrackMe, there is now a new tab called “EOTopo”.

Take a look, I guess it’s all self-explanatory really but just thought we’d point it out.

One of the major influences in production of EOTopo 200K was the realisation that GeoScience had ceased to plan an update of their very popular NATMAP 250K product. Once we identified the need for a future focused topographic mapping production service we then went about the process of taking our online offerings and working through the process to produce EOTopo 200K as an offline mapping product.

The official release of EOTopo 200K will be in this week’s newsletter but some of you have already found it and it's already selling even though we haven’t promoted it yet, so thought we better make a quick mention of it here for those with questions.

We are still working frantically on a few behind the scenes tasks, and what’s not written in the official documents is how much work has gone into this!! Just the process to run the map tile production output took 19 hours on a 6 Core i7 CPU with 32GB workstation. We wrote the first batch of maps to the media (SD cards and USB drives) and packaged them last night and these were shipped to the warehouse today! We've made a huge investment into this - its been many months of work but hopefully all worth it!
Michelle Martin
Marketing & Customer Support
I.T. Beyond Pty Ltd / ExplorOz

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Reply By: equinox - Tuesday, Nov 05, 2013 at 20:16

Tuesday, Nov 05, 2013 at 20:16
Hi Michelle,

Looks good.

With the online EOtopo in a vector format, and the subsequent conversion to Raster - what is the level of zoom that the files come standard with? Looking at the online version a birdseye view of 3km seems get the most information.

What format do you provide the "places" in? Is it WPT format?

With only 1 mapsheet per state are any there any potential issues with caching the map in portable devices, especially of larger states, possibly producing freezing of the map screen? (perhaps applicable only to older devices)

Cheers
Alan

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Follow Up By: ExplorOz - David & Michelle - Tuesday, Nov 05, 2013 at 21:16

Tuesday, Nov 05, 2013 at 21:16
Alan,

I was hoping to be able to render the actual 200K product in the online viewer and I sort of can but it is not that easy (as the sheet are projected differently and have a different resolution). So the best gauge is the run the online viewer at 216K scale (I am putting control so you can see the view scale on the leaflet viewer shortly, it is available in the places viewer) to see the online version at 217K you need to zoom in all the way till it will not zoom any more this is 54K then go out twice - 108K and then 217K. As mentioned if you open in places (turn off the features) and then zoom you can see the number at the top saying what scale it is rendering at.

Now using the online system is all great however the screen resolution is 72dpi and the product resolution is 200dpi and as such there is significantly more detail and clarity than the online viewer. I have just added some new images to the page which will show it a little better but it is difficult to produce 200dpi images on the web page renderer.

The places information provided is in Ozi Name Search at the moment so you can have Ozi add these as waypoints or map comments or even points. The EOTopo+Plus product that is mentioned will be the next generation of map features but at the moment the data is Ozi Name Search.

I have been using the states and full Australia on a number of devices and have not had any issues. Of course if we need there is no problem in slicing the images up in a different manner. I would not be expecting too many issues however as I was very careful with the file size in ECW and OZF and apart from the single map sheet for the whole country the state based files are about the same size as the old NATMAP zone files. I used various levels of compression with the aim of hopefully not introducing decompression issues for older machines. I guess we will find out as the product gets used but we are certainly open for feedback and have no problems in adjusting the files that are supplied in future releases. If anyone purchases the product and has this type of problem we will work through it and take the learning to the next release.

We hope this will be a collaborative product and we want to release the maps that you want to use. We have some definite future plans but we are really hoping to get user feedback and contributions. We have built ExplorOz that way and we expect to continue EOTopo in the same way.

Thanks for your interest.
David

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Follow Up By: ExplorOz - David & Michelle - Tuesday, Nov 05, 2013 at 21:24

Tuesday, Nov 05, 2013 at 21:24
Alan,

I just did a comparison using the Online Viewer and the actual product and reckon you get a much better idea from the 108K view as this is much closer to the 200dpi version on the 72dpi image viewer.

So zoom in all the way and back out one and this is much closer however the labels and symbols are still a a little larger in the 200K product.

One of my drivers for the 200K 200dpi was the fact the why I used the NATMAP for years and years I always zoomed in on OziExplorer to one be able to see & read the detail. Thus I wanted the 200K product to to be right for the majority at zoom 100%.

David
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Follow Up By: equinox - Tuesday, Nov 05, 2013 at 23:23

Tuesday, Nov 05, 2013 at 23:23
Just tried at 108K, looks like a good level.

Your future +Plus file sounds like a good idea with the active waypoint opening further info on the place.

Any thought on gridlines? I'm quite used to the 10k and 50k spacing on Natmaps and Hema, no biggie though.

Well done - will have to see if I have any change left over after my chrissie shopping.

Cheers
Alan


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Follow Up By: ExplorOz - David & Michelle - Tuesday, Nov 05, 2013 at 23:33

Tuesday, Nov 05, 2013 at 23:33
Thanks Alan, The production 200K map sets have grid lines - I left them off on the online view as it is a little hard to use them in the online system. I can enable them if you think it would be good but the 200K product maps have grid lines and labels. If you have a look at the images in the EOTopo page you will see the grind lines and labels.

David
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