Newgrove is a company specialised in software solutions, spatial information management (GIS) and software management consultancy

One of the very important tasks when designing a Web GIS application is to provide a comprehensive background mapping so the business data can be properly visualised with its spatial context.

In this particular case the customer wanted to create a map based on the Navteq 2010 dataset for the United Kingdom. The exercise was about designing a cartographic workflow that can be automatically applied to the whole data set so the base map can then be generated without a human supervision. Newgrove decided to use Manifold GIS as the desktop environment, the actual data tiling was to use Manifold MapServer.

Although manifold lacks some of the carto tools available in other GIS packages or graphic software it does offer enough to complete such task. It actually does offer some other functions that let one create some nice map features - for example the road shields labels were created from a drawing linked to a SQL query that created road label points spaced evenly along the road lines. This backed with the automatic resolution of label conflicts allowed us to nicely place the road shields on the map.