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

You could also work with Microsoft's visual earth mapping application and api or use Google's api. I have always programmed commercially with ESRI products and have not played with the open api's that much.

Also, you might want to look at Maker! and Finder! They are relatively new programs but I think they are free. Might be limited on embedding the data.Maker can be found here.

The problem is that spatial processing is fairly new in the non commercial scale.