Posts tagged Topographic Maps

USGS Topographical Background Tiler seems to still be working!

Aug 20th

Posted by Richard in add-ons

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We had removed the topo background tiler back in May because they said that they were stopping the service.  We had created a topo add-on to allow those users that had the topo tiles in their cache to continue to access them.  But recently we have noticed that with the Topo add-on installed it is still bringing in topo maps even for areas where we have not been before.  So if you want to have topographical background maps, and you haven’t downloaded the topo tiler add-on, then please do so.  Of course we can’t guarantee how long they will continue to offer this but for now it is working.  You can find the topo add-on download here.

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Topographical map background tiler going away May 1st, 2012

Apr 23rd

Posted by Richard in Depiction News

As we said in our Depiction 1.4 “What’s New” document:

Background Tiling Sources
As you may or may not know, Depiction is not in the data business. Depiction was meant to be a mapping platform that could easily bring in available public data sources and then allow the end user to add their own data.  We attempt to find public sources for QuickStart data to help folks get started easily.  We also use these public sources for our background tilers.  One of the sources we used for several maps was the Microsoft Research Map site know as Microsoft TerraServer.   They provided the following background tiling sources: usgs black and white, usgs urban, usgs topo.
Unfortunately they are going to stop providing these feeds effective May 1, 2012 and so in anticipation of that we have removed USGS Black and White and USGS Urban. We have other imagery sources that are just as good if not better than these. Unfortunately we haven’t found a replacement for the Topographic map and so we are going to leave it in for the moment.  If you use this source a lot we recommend that you zoom and pan the areas that you use a lot in order to get these tiles in your cache. Around May 1st we will be releasing a new version (1.4.1) of the software that will have the TOPO background tiler removed since new customers would not be able to get any tiles from this source.  We will also hope to release a free add-on for those that want to continue to use the TOPO tiles in your cache, that will allow you to still use them.
We will also be looking for new sources of Topo maps for our background tiler and hopefully we will be able to find a replacement source in the near future.  If any of you find a source please let us know.