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MapCruncher - Virtual Earth

by:Bill Chadwick

Overview

Have you ever looked at satellite photos of a building in Virtual Earth -- and wished you could zoom right in and see its floorplan? Have you ever used VE to plan a trip across town -- and wanted to seamlessly switch from its road maps to maps of bicycle trails, bus routes, or carpool lanes? Have you ever wanted to create and publish your own map mashups -- and wished you had a tool to make it easy to integrate a map you care about into Virtual Earth? With MapCruncher, you can!

The Virtual Earth API allows web developers to supplement Virtual Earth's maps with pushpins and lines. MapCruncher brings mashups to a whole new level by allowing developers to import entire maps to supplement the existing road and aerial imagery with detailed, application-specific information. The possibilities are endless: bicycle maps, transit maps, national park maps, university maps, antique city maps, or whatever drawn-to-scale maps you personally find interesting. You can even augment Virtual Earth with Do-It-Yourself Aerial Photography. See our Gallery for more examples.

Maps become dramatically more useful when registered to Virtual Earth. For example, last year, Jeremy moved to Kirkland and wanted to commute to Microsoft by bike. Jon pointed out the useful King County bike map, which is available on line in PDF form:

However, we couldn't figure out whether the bike trail crosses Interstate 405 at 60th Street, since the green line for the trail shows a break:

The answer can be found in Virtual Earth's aerial imagery, but it took us nearly 15 minutes to find this point in Virtual Earth, because we could only connect the two maps visually. Once we crunched the bike map into Virtual Earth's global coordinate system, a click of the mouse took us from the above image of the bike map to this one:

Mystery solved! A pedestrian bridge links bike trail across the highway.

MapCruncher makes it easy to publish maps overlaid on Virtual Earth. Once you are familar with the tool, it will take you about ten minutes to crunch a new map. Just find 5 to 10 corresponding landmarks on your map and on Virtual Earth, and MapCruncher will register your map to the global coordinate system, warp it to fit a Mercator projection, and generate a set of image tiles that can be seamlessly mashed up with VE's standard road or aerial imagery. It even makes a sample HTML page to show you how to use your mashed-up map.

MapCruncher accepts a variety of vector formats (PDF, WMF, EMF) and raster formats (JPG, PNG, TIFF, GIF, BMP).

System Requirements

To make a mashup: The MapCruncher application requires Windows XP or Server 2003. It also requires the .Net 2.0 runtime, which it will install if necessary.

To view a mashup: Browsers that are known to work include IE6, IE7, and Firefox version 1.5 or higher. Unfortunately, Safari and Opera do not yet work.

Installation Instructions

Run the downloaded installer. You will be promped for an installation directory. MapCruncher will be added to the Microsoft Research group in the Start menu.

Project Members

Project Lead

• Jeremy Elson

Primary Developers

• Jeremy Elson
• Jon Howell

Contributors

• Danyel Fisher
• John Douceur

Google Earth

Installation

1. Install Google Earth
   Make sure you have installed Google Earth on your computer. If not, download and install it from http://earth.google.com.
   
2. Get JRC content
   Click on the following link to open Google Earth and download the JRC file:
   1. Public version: http://dmaweb2.jrc.it/services/google/ses.kml; http://dmaweb2.jrc.it/services/google/TSX_Russia.kmz
   2. Restricted version: http://globalatlas.jrc.it/services/google/ses.kml (this link can only be accessed from the European Commission Intranet).
   
   If this fails, download the file (right click, save as) and open it locally.
   
   A new network link will appear in your "Temporary Places".
   
   
   
3. Save JRC content in Google Earth
   Right-click and select "Save to My Places" to store the network link. Now you will always have access to the up to date content provided by JRC SES
   
   

What is GIS?

by. Esri

A geographic information system (GIS) integrates hardware, software, and data for capturing, managing, analyzing, and displaying all forms of geographically referenced information.

Geography Matters Geography plays a role in nearly every decision we make. Choosing sites, targeting market segments, planning distribution networks, responding to emergencies, or redrawing country boundaries—all of these problems involve questions of geography. Geography Matters[PDF] —White paper

GIS allows us to view, understand, question, interpret, and visualize data in many ways that reveal relationships, patterns, and trends in the form of maps, globes, reports, and charts.

A GIS helps you answer questions and solve problems by looking at your data in a way that is quickly understood and easily shared.

GIS technology can be integrated into any enterprise information system framework.

• Essays on Geography and GIS [PDF]

Three Views of a GIS

A GIS is most often associated with a map. A map, however, is only one way you can work with geographic data in a GIS, and only one type of product generated by a GIS. A GIS can provide a great deal more problem-solving capabilities than using a simple mapping program or adding data to an online mapping tool (creating a "mash-up").

A GIS can be viewed in three ways:

1. The Database View: A GIS is a unique kind of database of the world—a geographic database (geodatabase). It is an "Information System for Geography." Fundamentally, a GIS is based on a structured database that describes the world in geographic terms. Learn more.
   
   
2. The Map View: A GIS is a set of intelligent maps and other views that show features and feature relationships on the earth's surface. Maps of the underlying geographic information can be constructed and used as "windows into the database" to support queries, analysis, and editing of the information. Learn more.
   
   
3. The Model View: A GIS is a set of information transformation tools that derive new geographic datasets from existing datasets. These geoprocessing functions take information from existing datasets, apply analytic functions, and write results into new derived datasets. Learn more.
   
   

By combining data and applying some analytic rules, you can create a model that helps answer the question you have posed. In the example below, GPS and GIS were used to accurately model the expected location and distribution of debris for the Space Shuttle Columbia, which broke up upon re-entry over eastern Texas on February 1, 2003. Learn more about this project.

Together, these three views are critical parts of an intelligent GIS and are used at varying levels in all GIS applications. Learn more about the technology.