Umm actually the maps are very very cheap. the USGS sells a 6 cd set for $400.00USD that maps out every road in the USA. This is the same mapset that 99.9% of all navigation software companies use to make their product. (it's public domain data so therefore you can resell or even give-away the data you bought from the USGS. the only company I know of that doesnt use the USGS/CENSUS data is navtech, and their maps are the worst I have ever used/seen Navtech data is sparse at best where you need it, and is full of errors.

So the argument that the mapping data is expensive is false.. It can be free/had very cheaply (have 10 guys go together to buy the cd set, $40.00 per person!)

All this might be true for the US, but it sadly isn´t true for Germany (and probably the rest of Europe), at least not to its full extend. You can get maps from government institutions that show all roads, and these can be bundled to any software using them without further payment AFAIK. However, they are a bit more expensive than the US ones (about 2000DM/1000US$) and, what is far more annoying, they miss information on one way streets, type of road etc.

What I currently do is trying to get more detailed information on where to get usable maps, how much they are, which format they use etc. For the time being, I try to design a compressed fileformat for those maps and to create a sample map with just a few (50-100) streets in them. However, I´m not sure yet which information should be stored in those maps. Also, there are trade offs for either high speed or small map files (see next post on these two points).

I´m also in the process of creating both a website and a mailing list for this project. And I´m surely looking for some programmers that would like to get engaged in this project. Like I said in a previous post, I´m open for either a GPL project, or a commercial (resp. shareware) product.



cu,
sven