What is the best way to read, represent and render map data?

Question

I am interested in writing a simplistic navigation application as a pet project. After searching around for free map-data I have settled on the US Census Bureau TIGER 2007 Line

Answer 1

the solution is :

• a geospatial server like mapserver, geoserver, degree (opensource).

They can read and serve shapefiles (and many other things). For example, geoserver (when installed) serve data from US Census Bureau TIGER shapefiles as demo

• a javascript cartographic library like openlayers (see the examples at link text

There are plenty of examples on the web using this solution