GeoNames Forum

Nasa has released a new terrain map covering 99% of the earth:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8126197.stm
Any chance to get a more complete & accurate elevation service based on this map?

Great news. Thanks for the info. A service based on this will certainly be an improvement to what we have now.
I have just tried to download a sample file to check it out. The download fails, I guess I am not the only one who is trying right now.

Best

Marc

any news here? ASTER elevation data would be a blast!

Today we have finished the processing of the data.

Check it out here:
http://www.geonames.org/export/web-services.html#astergdem

We didn't process Antarctica south of 65S.

Marc

Marc,

The XML service returns <srtm3> tags - is that intentional and final or should we expect that to change? Looks like a hangover from the SRTM service?

I'd be grateful if you could indicate if the astergdem service is production ready?

Many thanks for adding this - it's great to have and will add a ton of value to my app (http://stephentrainor.com/tools). New Zealand photographers in particular should be grateful...

Thanks,

Stephen

Stephen

Thanks for spotting the xml tag name. I have renamed it.

This tagname issue is the first and only error reported so far for this new service. The more it is used and tested the faster we can declare it production ready. On the commercial servers it has not yet been activated, we first want to run it on the free servers for at least a week more.

Best

Marc

Great work Marc, thanks a lot!
The astergdem-service takes a lot longer to process than srtm3. Is this due to the larger amount of data or are there optimizations (like caching?) missing?

It is due to the larger amount of data. We simply don't have enough disk space on the free servers available to store the data in the same format as we do for the srtm3 service.

Is the performance in general still acceptable compared to the srtm3? (not always it is a problem of the service itself, when the free servers are overloaded all requests take longer).

Marc

In our case we request 20 latlngs at once which made a big difference yesterday. But we're planning to purchase a license anyway and I'd guess that the performance will be much better with the commercial service?

for multiple lat/lng per request in a nearby area there is still a lot of performance improvement (caching) without having to increase the disk space required. This improvement will also be available on the free servers.

The performance on the commercial service is even better.

Sounds good, it's exactly the optimization we would need!
Please keep this thread updated, we'll switch from srtm3 to aster as soon as it get's faster.

the performance boost for astergdem multipoint requests has been deployed.

Marc

Marc

A belated thanks for getting the AsterGDEM services up and running so quickly.

I'm using them in my app, but only if SRTM returns no data, due to some of the concerns on quality of the ASTER data set noted here: http://www.viewfinderpanoramas.org/reviews.html#aster

I'd be interested to know others thoughts on the relative merits of the two sources.

Regards,

Stephen
http://stephentrainor.com