The big news of the week was Microsoft Virtual Earth’s announcement of a new version of Live Maps, and Google following days later with a new feature called My Maps. These are both ways, put simply, to do heads-up digitizing in a Web browser!
The importance of this is development is hard to exaggerate. For years the consumer marketplace has done street mapping extremely well. But that was just streets. “Real” GIS folks need to overlay data from various sources, right? Then last year OpenLayers let you have the best of both worlds, overlaying any arbitrary WMS on top of a Google Maps base map. With the merger of OpenLayers and Community Mapbuilder, expect to soon see a Google Maps base map under your choice of WMS and WFS services and/or embedded GML data, styled with SLD and all wrapped up in a nice KML or Context document.
Add to this the ability to create geographic content in your Web browser and access it via a URL, and a very interesting vision of Web-based GIS begins to emerge. It’s a vision that’s very different from the one the GIS conference circuit has been giving us all decade. I could expound on what I think that vision is, but that’s not really important. The most interesting thing I see here is that the architecture is so beautifully loosely-coupled that there is room for everyone’s vision to be realized. One thing I will predict is that the truly interesting time for Geo-startups begins now.
p.s. Does anyone else find it odd that such a major new feature was introduced by two pretty big companies in the same week? Coincidence, or something else? Please Adena get some dirt on this! inaccurate statement, see comments –Raj
Hi Raj – The Collections feature in Live Maps has been shipping for nearly a year! Our users have been creating custom maps and sharing them since May 2006. Later that year in September, we added the ability to draw Polygons and Polylines to the feature area. You can read more about that here:
http://virtualearth.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!2BBC66E99FDCDB98!4097.entry
Sometime around that May release is when we first supported GeoRSS in our map control for application developers
So there’s no dirt to dig up. At least not on this subject :-)
You are correct that last week we did indeed launch a new rev of Live Maps, and one of the major features that came along with that release is support for PUBLISHING GeoRSS. i hope this is a trend we see continue. If all of the major mapping sites can consume GeoRSS but there’s no (easy) way to create it, the format will struggle. This weeks release is our modest first step towards this end. Also, We have another release later this month that is developer focused that will make handling GeoRSS layers in our Map Control much easier.
regards,
Steve Lombardi
Virtual Earth Program Manager
My bad Steve. I went to the site to check out the new GeoRSS support and found cool drawing tools as well–not realizing they had been there for awhile.
Raj – I think what Steve was talking about is a somewhat “hidden” feature in VE, which is the *new* ability to subscribe to someone’s collection of points/lines/polygons. Open this example (http://maps.live.com/?v=2&cid=94A64037B5C0FB5C!604&encType=1) , and note the RSS Subscribe button in the left hand panel. Once subscribed, you will receive notice whenever I change the collection. IMO, this is a huge timesaver, because I don’t have to reload collections to see if anything has changed, and I can view the changes first in my RSS reader before opening a map.
Btw, I really love this quote:
“The most interesting thing I see here is that the architecture is so beautifully loosely-coupled that there is room for everyone’s vision to be realized. One thing I will predict is that the truly interesting time for Geo-startups begins now.”