Published
Wednesday, January 17, 2007 5:56 AM
by
martin
I just started playing with this excellent tool from Microsoft Research...
MSR Map Cruncher for Virtual Earth
It allows you to take a map in many different formats (pdf, jpg, etc.), mark out how locations correspond to those in Virtual Earth, add transparency to your special-purpose map and overlay it on Virtual Earth within a web page.
You could use it to indicate office locations, bus routes, cycle paths etc., and overlay it all on Virtual Earth's road map or aerial photo map. By doing so you allow people to find nearby resources such as rail stations, hotels, restaurants, car parks - anything that's already contained in the huge database at Windows Live. I think this is the future.
Today I often look at someone's special-purpose map on their website, then I have to cross-reference against a generic map (or aerial photo site) to figure out what's nearby. It's much nicer to have all that information overlaid in one place.
As the manager of a website, I'd rather maintain a mashup of my specific map overlaid with Virtual Earth because I wouldn't then have to maintain a list of nearby hotels, rail links, etc.: it's all there in Windows Live.