Open Street Map Data Now Available in Bing Maps

Open Street Map has been on a roll lately. A big partnership with AOL’s MapQuest has only been announced and now Bing joins the party as well. Data from Open Street Map will now be available as a separate layer in Bing Maps offering an alternative to the regular mapping data Microsoft provides with the help of its commercial partners. The new layer is available through an OpenStreetMap app which requires Microsoft Silverlight.

“OpenStreetMap (OSM) is the newest layer for Bing Maps and the newest Bing Map App in the gallery. The map app, dubbed simply, “OpenStreetMap” loads OSM maps as a new map style option. OpenStreetMap follows a similar concept as Wikipedia, but for maps and other geographic facts (despite its name, it's by no means only limited to streets and roads),” Microsoft’s Chris Pendleton, Bing Maps evangelist wrote.

Using Open Street Map with Bing is fairly straight forward, just install the app and switch to the OSM map layer. Most of the regular features on Bing Maps work properly and users can switch to one of the native layers, Bird’s Eye View and so on, and the back to the OSM layer with ease. For those familiar with Open Street Map, Microsoft notes that it chose the Mapnik visual style.

Open Street Map, as the name would imply, is an open mapping service which relies on volunteer contributors to provide all of the mapping data, hence the parallel with Wikipedia. The data is freely accessible to anyone under a Creative Commons license.

The project has been around for six years and has grown to over 250,000 contributors. The data it provides is used by a number of big players, Yahoo uses it in Flickr, for example. Recently, AOL announced that it is launching a version of MapQuest based on Open Street Map and that it is funding the project with $1 million to help it improve the data available for the US.