Development, Analysis And Research

Multimap

Posted in General by Andrew Johnstone on the August 11th, 2005

I recently started playing with a couple trial accounts from multi-map for a client of ours. I was quite surprised it is actually running Coldfusion and MySQL. Whilst I have heard of MySQL supporting GIS and Spatial data, I have never seen an implementation or known of one until now.

Whilst playing with Multimap I found a couple bugs within 5 minutes, the first being a problem with some calculations on tabular data types with CF complaining about LEFT(MID etc…
The other was a rather poor implementation of their user interface. I generally do things backwards and as a result rather than clicking through step 1 - ~6 I started at 6. This resulted in CF having trouble with creating a table in MySQL and obviously thowing an error. From what I can gather it is a very simple implementation, of which lat and lon coordinates are populated from their data.

Index
Multimap Index Page

Data
Bug One (MySQL Table Creation)
As you can tell this is a really poor interface, apparently they were reviewing the current interface according to one of their technical guys… If you skip a step you will most likely thow an cold fusion error:(
Multimap Data Page

Table
Bug Two (CF Error)
Multimap Table Page

Stats
Multimap Stats Page

Templates
Multimap Template Page

I implemented my own version, however the data I acquired was inaccurate and varied within roughly 1-2 miles as well as being a very limited on the amount of information it contained. I also received the sample RAW PAF (Postcode Address File) data from the Royal Mail, and having a look through seems very detailed, although not quite what I was looking for…

4 Responses to 'Multimap'

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  1. Andrew M. Johnstone said,

    on August 12th, 2005 at 1:55 am

    All credit due to the Multimap staff, as they managed to fix both bugs within the hour.

  2. Eric Coleman said,

    on August 12th, 2005 at 2:15 am

    They need to hire a designer… my god…..

  3. Andrew M. Johnstone said,

    on August 12th, 2005 at 3:42 am

    Some Costs for Multimaps services, the two I was interested in were Inline and StoreFinder. There are two seperate costs the first being per usage. Of which the costs are as follows:

    Fee Schedule
    No set up costs or annual license fee for this service. Buy deliveries in advance.
    Advance purchase of map deliveries:

    20,000 deliveries : £500
    50,000 deliveries : £1000
    100,000 deliveries : £1800
    200,000 deliveries : £3000
    500,000 deliveries : £5000

    And Annual Fees…

    “Annual fees for services are charged per template set required. Use of maps in multiple countries carries an extra annual fee of £1,000 per country (a cap can be discussed).
    HTML Storefinder £3,500
    XML Storefinder £4,000

    Adding filtered search from £500 for HTML versions”

  4. Development, Analysis And Research » Blog Archive » Streetmap said,

    on August 17th, 2005 at 4:46 pm

    [...] Development, Analysis And Research by Andrew Johnstone « Multimap Streetmap After reviewing [...]

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