Virtual earth tile sets
Even if virtual earth offers us map and aerial coverage of areas, still we are in search of good information. Therefore, by making use of tile layers of virtual earth we can create our own imagery server, which integrates the data, tools, and navigation methods into virtual earth.
The virtual earth SDK is designed on the foundation of tiles. Every tile represents a specific view of information. Virtual earth tile sets can be used for regular aerial views, hybrid map views and map views. You can also make use of tiling system for serving your own geospatially-based information. It means you can create your own tile server so that users not only use the maps but also use your specific information. In this article, we will discuss about techniques, which are necessary for serving your image data by using virtual earth technology.
The most complicated challenge in creating the tile server is matching up our data with the data of virtual earth map. This kind of process is very much challenging because you must overcome the joined problems of registration as well as projection. It means we require setting our image to fit with Mercator projection of virtual earth and you must determine the longitude and latitude boundaries of your image.
Every map as well as map style is divided into a set of a 256x256 pixel tiles. You are able to find out the name of particular tile, for that only you have to go maps.live.com and then use the firebug tool of Firefox or use internet explorer Dev Toolbar and then turn on the image paths.
For designing our own tiles, we have to cut the image into 256x256 pixel chunks and then we have to produce a significant naming scheme. After this, you have to think about how you are going to host your images. If you are planning to follow the naming scheme of Microsoft then you require registering your images in accordance with virtual earth tiles. It means that our tiles should share the bounding boxes with virtual earth tiles.
If you are working with larger image, then make use of Map Cruncher tool because this tool is desktop application, which permits you to select the registration points at your image, and then map these points to virtual earth locations. When you will have the collection of sufficient registretation points, your image is automatically shaped by MapCruncher tool and this tool divides the image into tiles, which will match with virtual earth tiles. This map cruncher tool is very useful because it builds the web page, which shows your tiles at the top side of virtual earth.
When you got your own tiles, the use of these tiles from virtual earth map is very easy. If you named your tiles on the basic of virtual earth naming process then you require designing VETilesSourceSpecification and make use of VEMap.AddTileSource () method.
When you will complete the process of building the specification then you require to insert a new tile layer for your map.
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Tags: Microsoft Virtual Earth
