LA Transit map
Online maps are great, of course, but how do you compare a map you already have -- a cycle map of Seattle, say, or a town plan of Victorian Kidderminster -- with a web-based offering? You couldn't, but now you can with Microsoft Research's prototype MapCruncher. Basically you compare the two maps and use crosshairs to identify a number of common points until you have enough to synchronise the maps and create an overlay. The two maps are your map and Microsoft's Virtual Earth.
And here's a killer application: you can take, for example, an architect's floor plans for a mall, and the utility supply diagrams (water, gas, electricity etc) and create a mash-up with the satellite view.
According to a Microsoft interview:
"MapCruncher empowers anybody in the world to take whatever data is important to them," explains [Jeremy] Elson, the project lead, "and share it with everybody else in a format that makes all of these types of data interoperable."
The MapCruncher download page says:
MapCruncher accepts both drawing formats (PDF, WMF, EMF) and image formats (JPG, PNG, TIFF, GIF, BMP). The MapCruncher application requires Windows Server 2003 or Windows XP. It also requires the .Net 2.0 runtime, which it will install if necessary.
There's an interesting gallery of some of the Cruncher mashups already created.
Comment: This sounds like something that must have been done before, so please point me to earlier examples, if you know of any....
