Your system is as good as its maps
When using an information system utilizing maps, the end-user tends to pay attention to two aspects: the quality and the functionality of the maps. For some users, the quality the maps even determine the quality of the whole system. This is something that we application developers need to be able to react to.
Often the maps are produced by entirely different operators, and the applications may use third-party standardized services that the system provider cannot control. When choosing maps for your system, you should pay attention to the following aspects:
- Is the material provided correct and accurate enough?
- Is the material up-to-date, and is the date of the latest update available?
- Does the performance of the map service correspond to your needs, meaning that is the download speed sufficient even during stress peaks?
- Is the service reliable enough, meaning is the amount of downtime tolerable?
- In case of disturbance, do you have an attentive and quick-to-respond support service?
- Is the pricing of the service predictable so that you can prepare for the costs in your budget?
Map providers often offer interfaces, however, sometimes the performance of the service has not been given enough emphasis, which leads to growing downtime. The end-user may be left with the impression that the system does not work well even though the problems are actually caused by the external data interfaces. In browser-based systems, the worst-case scenario is that when the query results in an incorrect result or no result at all, the whole application is flooded. On the other hand, maps that download lightning-fast make using the system feel fluent. Utilizing well-working interface services is worthwhile as it can save you from constant updating of the material.
Here at Bitcomp we have deemed that it makes sense to help our customers not only by providing systems and ready-to-use applications but also by offering well-working map services. This way our customers can have all the services they need from one place and we can guarantee an all-around excellent user experience. Additionally, we can utilize internally managed map services flexibly in our analyses and machine learning algorithms requiring high performance.
