If you want to check where the nearest coffee shop to your home is, if you want to know how to get to a place in your city, or if you want to see where in the world your foreign pen friend lives, there's now a new free online map you can use.
Last month, China started its official online mapping service, Map World. "Through this free online service users can fly over mountains and valleys around the world and search for restaurants and traffic information across the country for free," said Xu Deming, director of the State Bureau of Surveying and Mapping (SBSM). The bureau, which does China's surveying and mapping work, is in charge of the Map World project.
Users can get into Map World through www.tianditu.cn or www.chinaonmap.cn and search for 2- and 3-D images from across the world. The home page shows a view of the Great Wall.
"It took about two years to prepare the service with all the satellite (卫星) images taken from 2006 to 2010," said Jiang Jie, director of the database department (数据库部门) under SBSM.
The technology (技术) and website are still at an early stage. The images from inside China are detailed. Users can see close pictures of roadsides. But the views of places outside China are less clear.
Service providers have more than 80 machines, with the ability to deal with 10 million requests (请求) daily, while Google Earth, Google's mapping service, has thousands of machines, Jiang said.
"Our map service can update (更新) data about twice a year, but Google Earth can update its information every couple of minutes, through satellites," Jiang said.
The bureau said it will continue developing Map World. At the same time, you can have a try for yourself. Some users have given their opinions about the service after trying it. One student in Beijing said that Map World even shows the small bookstore near her school.
