Bing Maps Crowd Sourcing Mapping Effort Live via OpenStreetMap

Mapnik is the latest option added to Bing Maps, on top of Road, Aerial, Bird’s Eye, and Dynamic, for viewing content. This is in fact the OpenStreetMap mode which has been introduced to Microsoft’s mapping, search and location platform, as the Redmond company unveiled a new layer and App for the gallery. People already familiar with OpenStreetMap, know that crowd sourcing is at the heart of the project.

Chris Pendleton, the Bing Maps Technical Evangelist for Microsoft explained that OpenStreetMap is designed to allow people around the world to contribute with their data to the evolution of OSM maps. Information can be focused on maps, roads, streets or geographic locations, and can come from any user. Once shared, the information is uploaded to OpenStreetMap's central database, but of course, no detail of OSM maps is set in stone, as additional users can choose to contribute their input, and catalyze the evolution of content.

With the latest move from Microsoft, Bing Maps users now have available a new OpenStreetMap (OSM) layer as well as a Bing Map App in the gallery. Essentially, the map app has been set up to load the OSM maps as a new map style option.

“Users can still perform searches atop of the OSM map layer. Once the OSM Maps are rendered, users will find the OSM map option listed in the map types so if you switch to Bird’s Eye or some other native Bing map types, you can easily return to the OSM map style. Of note, we are using the Mapnik map style from OSM (one of the many map styles available to open source users) to create our OSM map type. People love the details you see?” Pendleton said.

“We’ve taken the OSM data as is, created tiles to fit our tile schema and are hosting it on our Windows Azure CDN. This means, pure OSM data coming down at screaming fast speeds from the massive Windows Azure infrastructure built out to support globally distributed applications…like Bing Maps,” he added.

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