Virtual Earth / Live Maps: Collections

Thematic Mapping and Shaded Area Maps with Virtual Earth

Thu, 14 Sep 2006 07:24:17 GMT

It used to be that if you needed to create presentation quality shaded area maps you had to spend thousands of dollars on a GIS or Business mapping package and the data that was required to fuel it. Esri's Arc products for instance are really powerful, but are far too complex and costly for most of us to get into. When Microsoft released MapPoint 2000 for about 250 bucks, the average person could create nice looking data driven maps like this:

Lets say you have a spreadsheet with a column of zipcodes and a column of crime incidents for each zipcode. With MapPoint you can just drag that spreadsheet into the map and you instantly have a shaded color coded map showing where Crime is high versus low.

But what if you don't want to spend 250 bucks or your needs are modest and you only need to make one or Two maps? Streets and Trips, MapPoint's younger sibling, is a pretty good deal at 35 bucks. It doesn't have the data mapping ability, but it has nice tools for drawing shaded areas which is perfect for a one-timer.

And what if 35 bucks is still more coin than you want to drop? at this point you may think I'm about to sell you a Ginsu knife. But Instead, I'm going to show you the new drawing features in Live Local that let you create shaded area maps on the web and share them with as many people as you want - for free. Here is a map I made today showing the King County Council Districts for 2006:

I sketched up each territory using the drawing tools that are built right into Live Local, adding each to a Collection. For each District I specified a link to the Council members website and included each of their photos. For color, I assigned each a random color from the provided palette. On its own, this is already quite useful - the County could provide a link to this map on their website, allowing me to find out my district and contact my council member just by typing my address into the search field.

What if I wanted to assign each district a color or style based on some criteria, as in the crime example above. Perhaps I want to highlight the Democratic districts in one color and the republican districts in another. Easy! I can just just select a territory by clicking on its edge, then assign it a new fill color, line color or line style on the provided palettes like this:

As you hover over each Color or Line style you will get a realtime preview on the map of what your territory will look like. then just click to select. How about sharing the map with others? Once again, Easy! Assuming they have a web browser (yes, they do) they have everything they need already. Live Local will generate a personal permalink for your collection that you can email to others or post on your blog or website. On the Scratchpad use the 'Share' menu to email the permalink, or copy it to the clipboard to paste in other applications.

and remember, permalinks are a powerful way to send someone a map with many other features turned on. If I want to send you my district map with a layer of all of the Home Depot stores in the area, It would look like this. and if I want to turn on the real time traffic flow layer, I would send you this.

Subscribe to an RSS feed of your neighborhood!

Fri, 11 Aug 2006 03:47:34 GMT

Thanks to a bunch of prods and some tech support from Mikel Maron, I've added the ability to grab an RSS feed to the Collection browsing mashup. The concept is really sweet! I hope to improve my implementation to live up to all the potential sweetness, but even the current state of V1 it's very useful and a lot of fun to play with. You can generate an RSS feed for any region on Earth and add it to your favorite reader to be continually kept up to date on changes in the area. For instance, you could create a Feed that covered your neighborhood and was filtered by the word 'Tennis' to be alerted whenever some added a Tennis related item to the Virtual Earth. mashers can also use the feed and its simple REST interface to build streams of geographic content into their apps. more on that in a moment. First, get started plucking your first feed:

Use this simple map interface to navigate to the area of your choice. It can be as tight as a small neighborhood, or as broad as the entire planet - up to you. Pretty straight forward app which I talked about a little in my last post on the subject. Pan, Zoom, or jump to the location of your choice with the search field.
Add an optional search keyword. if you omit this, your RSS feed will show all new items in the area (which is what I like to do). Specifying a Keyword will limit the results by doing an exact text match. no fuzzy search or stemming, so keep it simple -'Tennis', 'dogs', 'restaurant'... The app displays a max of 200 items per refresh.
Hit the 'Subscribe to this map' link above the map and grab the URL for the RSS feed. Add it to your favorite reader.

The feed will contain links to virtual earth to open the original collection that the item was created in. Since it is a GeoRSS feed, you can view in standard readers as well as clients that understand the Geo markup. Here is a sample feed of restaurants near Hyde Park that Mikel is parsing with his Mapufacture library and displaying on a map from google.

Developers can do some interesting stuff with the feed, using it like a geo data pump. The REST interface will let you query dynamically based on geography and keyword. Here is a query for items related to 'library' around the state of Massachusetts:

http://veteam.members.winisp.net/VECollectionSearch/GeoRSS.aspx?count=20&Y1=43.37710&X1=-74.124755&Y2=41.14143&X2=-70.279541&keywords=library

where X1 and Y1 are the Northwest corner and X2,Y2 are the Southeast corner of a query rectangle. 'keywords' is the optionl text filter of course, and 'count' is the max number of items to return. The response is an easy to parse XML document formatted where each item looks like this:

<item>

<title>

<![CDATA[ beverly farms branch library ]]>

</title>

<![CDATA[ the addition was completed two years ago<br>From <a href='http://local.live.com/?v=2&cid=AD6AD80FDD2D4194!105'>676R hale street, beverly farms</a> at Virtual Earth ]]>

</description>

<link>

<![CDATA[ http://local.live.com/?v=2&cid=AD6AD80FDD2D4194!105 ]]>

</link>

<georss:point>42.56299 -70.81363</georss:point>

</item>

email me your thoughts on where we could take this and suggestions to improve its usefulness. here is a brief FAQ:

1. Why doesn't my reader like the feed? Pluck, IE7 and various parsing libraries I have tried seem to like the feed just fine. Live.com and Google.com each seem to have troubles though. I can only imagine this means I have some bad formatting in there. I'll try to diagnose and fix this, but if the feed doesn't work in your reader of choice you'll have to either trya new reader, or try again in a few days to see if I have fixed my bug. I'll post details here if I do.

2. How do I get my own entries in the Feed? Easy! just create a Collection at Virtual Earth, mark it as 'public', then email yourself the URL fo rthe collection and view it. This weird step of viewing your own collection is needed as my indexer is only considering Collections that have been viewed in this way. If you have no idea what a Collection is, here is a brief tutorial that will guide you through making a Collection.

3. I created a Colection and made it public and all that, but it still doesn't show in the feed. I run the indexer once or twice a day and it grabs a random set of new public collections. I fyours didn't make it in there, email me (stevelom at microsoft d com) the URL for your collection and I'll force it in the index.

enjoy!

Collection of the Week

Fri, 11 Aug 2006 01:46:50 GMT

I really can no longer review every public collection that gets created - there's just too many. but I still try to check out as many as possible. People are starting to do a wider variety of things with Collections, which is what I had hoped for. This week I posted some exceptional examples over at PassThePOI, but this companion to Sir Mix-A-Lot's "Posse on Broadway" video stands out from the pack. check it.

Exploring Collections interactively and with GeoRSS feeds

Tue, 08 Aug 2006 18:50:09 GMT

Here is a fun toy for exploring Collections in Live Local. Users are creating on the order of 100,000 Collections a month since the feature launched a few months ago. We will soon be adding the ability to search for and browse Public Collections, but in the meanwhile I have built a simple index and web app to provide a glimpse into what others are doing with Collections. The index is a small subset of all public Collections but grows daily. I have spent hours of fascination scrolling through the map absorbing other users Collections around the world. try it yourself. here is a map of Chicago.

http://www.veteam.members.winisp.net/VECollectionSearch/CollectionHunter.htm?lat=41.878908&lon=-87.634313&lvl=16

Same area with filter for ‘architecture’

http://www.veteam.members.winisp.net/VECollectionSearch/CollectionHunter.htm?lat=41.878908&lon=-87.634313&lvl=16&q=architecture

Zoom out to expand your search, drag the map to continually refresh the display.

Some things to remember

Each time you move the map your query will auto refresh
Each query returns a max of 200 items, so zoom in or provide a keyword filter if you are at the maximum.
The keyword search is VERY basic. I haven’t implemented a full text index in this Web app, just a sql ‘Like’ query with a simple spatial index. So if you get zero results try a single keyword and not a phrase
The popup only shows the text of the item. To explore it fully (and to see all of the elements of the containing Collection) click the link to open the full collection at WLL
the app is running on a tiny little server but seems to hold up pretty good for average use.

What’s Next? I built a simple REST based parameterized interface that returns RSS. Specifically a GeoRSS feed. With it you can add an RSS feed to your favorite reader that keeps you continually updated as things change in your neighborhood, or anywhere on earth. I haven’t had time to tidy it up and get it added to the site, but if anyone is interested email me at stevelom@microsoft.com to prod me to finish it. With an hour or 2 of work I could have it online. With the keyword parameter on the REST interface you can create an RSS feed of all restaurant activity in a neighborhood, as a for instance. or subscribe to a feed of any mentions of winery. or whatever.

Want your Collection added to the index. Simple! Just create a Collection (tutorial), mark it public, then share it with a friend. The indexer picks up a random set of new public collections to add to the index daily. If yours isn’t added within a day or so, you can email it to me and I’ll explicitly add it.

Any other suggestions? I'm interested in hearing about ideas for exploration and sharing of this type of user created content.