Thursday, June 18. 2009

Best Maps of Tehran? User Generated

Brady Forrest at O'Reilly Radar studies the map portal's maps of the area and concludes:

"Looking at the images below [ Yahoo, Mapquest, Google, and Bing] it becomes very clear that user-generated maps win in hard to reach places."

Flickr has even swapped out Yahoo Maps in favor OSM (something they've done before).

Wednesday, June 17. 2009

Tasty Taste of Chicago Map?

West Monroe Partners built the app using Microsoft Azure (cloud services) and Sliverlight. And, no, there's no Bing Maps for Enterprise involved, this is a "cartoon" map of the annual food expo.

While it's very pretty, I wanted more interaction. The left hand side offers a "table of contents" of events by day or food vendor (alphabetical). Click on a date and the events for that day are listed on the right and highlighted on the map. Click on a vendor and the map "zooms there" and provides details. Want to see what the vendor next to it is by clicking on the map? Nope, can't do that. Want to click on the "ticket" symbol to learn about how much tickets are? Nope, can't do that. Want to click on anything on the map for more information? Nope, can't do that. Clicking on the map seems to enable only panning and zooming. Frankly, I wanted to click on stuff! In more practical terms, I want to know which food vendors are near the shows I want to see. Alas, the map doesn't allow that (at least not easily).

(Oh, and I tried it on both Mac/Safara and WinXP Firefox, just to be sure it was no "just a Mac thing.")

- press release

Monday, June 15. 2009

"Landmarks" on Bing Maps Directions

Gary Price at Resource Shelf found them.

Tuesday, June 9. 2009

Podcast: Spatial Databases: A Commodity?

This week's question: Is the spatial database a commodity? With all the big database players storing and querying spatial data and several open source offerings in the market, is spatial no longer special when in comes to the database world? Is it time to "stop getting excited" about the addition of spatial support and simply use the technology?


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Monday, June 8. 2009

Bing Maps Geocodes Searched Images

I didn't find this feature, Gary Price noted it on his Resource Shelf blog.

Basically, you do an image search on Bing for a city. I used Boston and found these. If you click on the "Show Map" link you'll see the images posted on Bing Maps.

So, how does Microsoft geocode the images? A Microsoft spokesperson responded to my question:

We used an algorithm to associate top points of interest and then used our Image Search index and Bing Maps technology to associate images with those points of interest in selected cities.

Wednesday, June 3. 2009

Keeping up with Microsoft SQL Server Spatial

Last year at our Location Intelligence Conference, many attendees were treated to one of the first in depth looks at Microsoft SQL Spatial. And since that time, with all of the ruckus over Bing and Bing Maps for the Enterprise, aka Virtual Earth (there is a ruckus over Bing, right?), it's easy to lose sight of the more "meaty" technology of SQL Server Spatial, or SSS for short. At today's PBBI Insights conference in Orlando, Ed Katibah, Microsoft's Spatial Program Manager, revealed a few new tidbits. I'll give you a few morsels to chew on below but I won't do justice to some of the details that Ed has provided on his blog, SpatialEd.