Dealing with positioning on the surface of the Earth is vastly more complicated than inexperienced software developers appreciate. At heart, most mapping systems try to take a somewhat spherical object and represent it in a two-dimensional grid. To make it more interesting, the Earth is not perfectly spherical. It is somewhat flattened and irregular. No matter how you approach it, this problem results in distortions of the Earth’s surface. At Newquist Solutions, we understand these problems and can bring our experience to you. Let us help you:
- Understand map projections and choose the correct projection(s) for your project.
- Deal with degenerate cases of map display, such as the North and South Poles and the International Date Line.
- Understand special cases of mapping geometry, such as great circles and why a square may not always be a square.
- Understand the issues of digital map data for raster, terrain, and vector data.
- Develop algorithms for processing digital map data.