We have been consulting with Lima 2000 since 2007. Lima 2000 has one of the best street databases for Lima, Peru and initially they wanted to make a google style “street finder” for the capital city of Peru. The web page shown below has our implementation as the Buscador de Calles.

The cartography is based upon the Lima 2000 line of printed map products and is implemented through MapServer and PHP. With this combination we wrote a custom tile generator for this project before they were widely available online. The search engine is written in PHP and uses an optimized mysql database. After re-inventing the wheel with moderate success for the client side draggable map interface in javascript, we chose to go with the Google API. While much was learned through creating the map interface, the Google team has much more expertise and resources available to maintain the codebase for the draggable map.

Most of this work was done in 2008 and 2009 and our working relationship now is based upon maintenance and upgrades (we also maintain the rest of the website). In the future we hope to migrate all of the data to PostgreSQL, optimize the search engine and provide a geocoding service, and also give the “street finder,” along with the entire website, a responsive design.