Improving usability for high marker density maps

1
votes

I'm working on an application using Google Maps to display some data for a number of categories in a Google Map. Panning and zooming controls have to be enabled.

The categories have different marker densities, and for the categories with highest density, there are so many markers are displayed, making it difficult to navigate in.

Are there any way I can improve the usability of overly crowded maps?

1
jquerygoogle-mapsuser-interfaceusability
Clustering is the normal pattern for such issues. - steveax
OK, but I can't figure a way to group markers other than by their vicinity. That would be an O(n^2) computation. Is that a good idea? - Jørgen
Here is the "Too many markers" example from the Google Map API: gmaps-samples-v3.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/toomanymarkers/… - Boris Delormas

1 Answers

2
votes

Look at View port marker management here: http://code.google.com/intl/sv/apis/maps/articles/toomanymarkers.html#viewportmarkermanagement

Basically, you can use MarkerClusterer (API v2, API v3). You can also deploy some server-side solution to ajax-obtain only markers in current viewport. Also get inspired by this question.