How does Anquet process map updates?

Processing the Data

From a human perspective, the data processing is not time consuming, we upload the data, and then set the tools running. Then we run some checks on the data before putting it live on Anquet Cloud.

We can’t just deliver the map data to our customers in the format it is delivered. There are 3 main reasons for that:

The terms of the OS license deem that we must ship the data in a format that only our software can read – i.e. this is to protect copyright.

The map tiles are too large for smooth operation. As you scroll the map screen, loading some 1km squares to fill the gap is quite quick – loading the next 20km*20km tile would be noticeable on slower machines. On mobile phones these issues are magnified due to the constraints of the devices.

On the map types where we support our Enhanced Zoom technology, we need to create the Enhanced Zoom map layers.

Compression

Most compression systems such as say zip are required to balance speed of compression and decompression against absolute compression ability – you wouldn’t want to wait whilst a photo was compressed to be added to an email for instance.

Our requirements are quite different, we only compress the map images once on Anquet Cloud.

This allows us to tune our customised compression system. The compression step is very slow, but attains a higher level of compression, yet decompress is quick.

The result is smaller map files than other compression techniques would obtain.