Gilles Bassière wrote:
Hi list,
I'm doing a comparative study of OpenSource cartographic servers
(Mapserver, Geoserver and Mapnik). Beside raw performance and
features, I'd like to assess the rendering quality, say how pretty
produced maps are. Precisely, I'm interested in the quality of the
drawing work, my point is not about symbology, nor styling of maps.
I have some problems to find a set of objective criteria I could
benchmark my servers against. So far, I have already identified the
following:
- sharpness of details
- smoothness of lines
I like how sharpness of details and smoothness of lines are in conflict :-)
- uniformity of colors
I'm open to any comments. Do you think these criteria are consistent
regarding the purpose of my study? Does anyone have other criteria to
suggest?
All my advice falls under symbology / styling and how well a map
communicates.
It is going to be very difficult to access quality in an objective
manner; here are a couple of ideas:
- Compare the full colour PNG formats to close the applications can come
to that using 8=bit PNG or JPeg
- Compare ability to labeling (if you do not consider that styling)
If you can load your own data into the different environments a range of
different tests should open up for you:
- compare image at different scales; notice when features "cut out"
- see how well they do at rendering narrow polygons; subtract points if
the resulting map looks invalid
- zoom out and notice how well features (and labels) converge or are
combined
Best of luck for what should be a really interesting write up; I am
looking forward to seeing how MapServer 4 does against MapServer 5.
Jody
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