14 DAY TRIAL // The new version of the Live Maps India consumer website is live and ready for users since February 3, 2009. But the update does not stop at the consumer-side of Live Maps, as Microsoft is now offering developers a new application programming interface designed to permit applications taking advantage of the Virtual Earth Platform to use Indian map tiles via AJAX Control or SOAP XML Web Services. In fact, version 4 of Live Maps India brings to the table a range of new features and data updates, including Virtual Earth Web Services (VEWS): with a new Search Service covering locations, business and collection, the Route Service for Route and Find Near By and the Geocode Service, delivering the lat/long of a certain location but also the address for a lat/long (reverse geo-coding).
Chris Pendleton, Virtual Earth Tech Evangelist, Microsoft, indicated that the update also offered “street maps for 8 more Indian cities (Nasik, Indore, Sholapur, Surat, Nagpur, Pimpri/Chinchwad, Chandigarh/Mohali/Panchkula, Panaji/Marmagao) taking the count to 17. Richer Coverage for Mumbai (Locality count increased from 600 in V1 to 2000 and count of Points of general interest increased from 10K to 31K). Improved Inter-town Road Network within 16 states. Landmarks/places of general interest along the road network and cities/towns/major localities count increased from 20K to 48K.”
A feature specific for Indian users is the Landmark-based Driving Directions, permitting navigation not by street/road addresses but via landmark-based routing instead. At the same time, the website allows users to put together routes with multiple points through Multipoint Driving Directions and Round Trip. At the same time, the update has taken to the next level the Collections Search feature.
“In v1, users could create and overlay their information like places of interests, routes, photographs etc. on the map and share it with others. Now with the v2 release: users can search this information. It is integrated with other searches i.e. if no result is found for a business query, collection search will look for it in the content generated by the community and relevant results will be shown to the users. A rich set of community content like wikipedia.org, bbs.keyhole.com, virtualglobetrotter.com etc. is available to the user. Users can now explore all the collections available in a given geographical area like city, locality etc,” Pendleton added.
With the interactive SDK and the Virtual Earth Map Control, developers can now build custom map applications tailored to the En-In market.