Multimap :: Blog

Users of multimap.com may have noticed that, if you are in London, you have a choice of map styles. The good people from Harper Collins provide the local street maps that many Londoners are familiar with, while our friends at Tele Atlas provide many of the maps for much of the world that you see on multimap.com.

Our gorgeous local London street maps are painstakingly hand-crafted by the cartographers at Harper Collins.  Each map has been manually created, by assigning colors, fonts, placing street names and other labels. In fact Harper Collins have been doing this for over 175 years! Your traditional pirate treasure map, the Mappa Mundi and the Harper Collins London maps are all excellent examples of hand-crafted maps.

Our Tele Atlas maps are a different animal. For a start Tele Atlas don’t just cover London streets, they have street maps that cover most of the western world and more.  That is a lot of maps and too many to hand-craft! Our Tele Atlas maps are computer generated, using a software program and lots and lots of computers running all day and all night. Databases of points, lines, labels and more are converted into images using the software applications and scripts that govern what the maps look like. They include rules for deciding which labels appear at which scales, where the labels are placed and what color to use for different road types.

To see the difference in map types, search for London on multimap.com. The default map is a Tele Atlas-based map. Zoom in and you will see that labels change and move to find a better fit at different scales. Hover over the ‘map’ button and you’ll see our map switcher show which map styles are available. Switch to the Harper Collins London maps. Zoom in and out and you’ll see the same map grow and shrink, but with no change to the content of the map itself.

You can see the same effect across Great Britain with Ordnance Survey raster maps, and through a choice of map styles in Australia, New Zealand and Malaysia.

You may be asking ‘what brought this blog on’? Well, seeing as you ask, two things.

First of all, we recently gave our Tele Atlas maps a makeover. Because we control their look and feel, we can develop new designs to make them cleaner, clearer and easier on the eye. You’ll see the new style across Europe and North America.

Secondly, we recently released an Open API, a free Multimap service for the developer community that allows anyone to play with our mapping, routing and geocoding. The ability to switch maps is available in the Open API too, and you can use or choose Ordnance Survey and Harper Collins local maps, and computer generated maps from Tele Atlas, Navteq, AND and more.

We’re delighted to let you know that those good people from Harper Collins, Tele Atlas and AND have joined with us to donate their maps to the Multimap Open API community.

A big thank you to them from everyone at Multimap.