French government has launched a Google Maps and Google Earth rival. The Géoportail.fr site offers satellite images of France at resolutions up to half a metre, which is same to the resolutions offered by Google for a portion of its images of the world’s populated areas.

This French site was developed in conjunction with the Institut Géographique National and the Office of Geological and Mineral Research with funding from the government of about $7.5m. In addition to images from aerial satellite photographs, the service also includes detailed maps.

Features expected to be included in the future include geological data and 3D images. The web server on which the application is hosted can support 50,000 to 100,000 connections an hour, or about one million a day. But a number of sites reported this has not been enough to handle the overwhelming demand.  The Géoportail and Institut Géographique National homepages take a good few minutes to load up themselves at present. Technicians are apparently working on increasing the site’s capacity.

 

 

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