> Before Google steamrolled the competition with free maps around 2010, streaming vectorial maps were quite a big thing in EU. I completely forgot the names of

> Before Google steamrolled the competition with free maps around 2010, streaming vectorial maps were quite a big thing in EU. I completely forgot the names of the big players in the area, however the maps were rendered on the client after being preprocessed (generally for streaming/rendering efficiency) via a flash or java applet. > The maps were usually reprojected in variable UTM (according to your TZ - on the one I was working with) and/or using a Gauss projection, which is an extremely good compromise for whole countries. Because it was dynamic, the reprojection was a continuum while panning, usually imperceptible for the user at country scale. You could rotate the map, as well as query for road names in any spot instead of hunting down the (often missing) labels. I'd be interested if you could remember any names because I don't remember anyone doing a good job with vector maps in 2005 when the google maps api came out (embedded google maps were long established by 2010). Performance would have been pretty atrocious even in Flash, especially if they were from any established GIS companies, where incredibly slow desktop software was already the accepted norm. Maybe a very generous interpretation of continuous reprojection, but I'm not aware of any decent system like you describe until the early 2010s (like the one the article links to[1]) and even then there's no real products built around them, until now :) [1] http://berniejenny.info/pdf/2012_Jenny_AdaptiveCompositeMapProjections.pdf http://berniejenny.info/pdf/2012_Jenny_AdaptiveCompositeMapP...