14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft is building a tool that will enable the tracking of user behavior on Virtual Earth. Hotmap is the product of Danyel Fisher, a researcher with the VIBE Group from Microsoft Research, and will permit the creation of a representation of how the users interact with online maps. Fisher is also the author of the "How We Watch the City: Popularity and Online Maps" paper that will find its way to the ACM CHI 2007 Conference.
"One way of conceptualizing physical spaces is to look at where people notice, remember, or note them. Computer-assisted methods give us new tools based on implicit, rather than explicit, data about how users have examined and travelled online through cities. "Hotmap" is a tool that visualizes how people have used maps.live.com, an interactive mapping service, looking at what parts of the maps they find most compelling," revealed Fisher.
According to Fisher, Hotmap is directly based on data extracted from Microsoft's Virtual Earth, Microsoft's interactive mapping service. Virtual earth has evolved considerably since its initial introduction back in 2005, and is now more than a mapping service, also allowing the embedding of additional maps via a Javascript API.
"Because this is an online application, we can benefit from the server logs. Tile server logs are standard IIS logs: they store an IP address, a date and time of access, and a URL, as well as several other data points that are not relevant to this discussion. We aggregate those logs together, producing database records that record only the number of hits on each day for each tile. Because we know where each tile is, we can then visualize that usage as a chloropleth of tile downloads over location," Fisher added.
As you can see from the adjacent image, Hotmap will deliver a visual guidance, through highlighted portions of the map for the most "circulated" locations with Virtual Earth.