Is this the Gate(S)way to LBS?
Willie IV must now be getting desperate to find a "toll booth" which he can commandeer and ding us everytime we make a path though Virtual Earth

MSR MapCruncher for Virtual Earth

location based services

Overview
Have you ever looked at satellite photos of a building in Virtual Earth -- and wished you could zoom right in and see its floorplan? Have you ever used VE to plan a trip across town -- and wanted to seamlessly switch from its road maps to maps of bicycle trails, bus routes, or carpool lanes? Have you ever wanted to create and publish your own map mashups -- and wished you had a tool to make it easy to integrate a map you care about into Virtual Earth? With MapCruncher, you can!
The Virtual Earth API allows web developers to supplement Virtual Earth's maps with pushpins and lines. MapCruncher brings mashups to a whole new level by allowing developers to import entire maps to supplement the existing road and aerial imagery with detailed, application-specific information. The possibilities are endless: bicycle maps, transit maps, national park maps, university maps, antique city maps, or whatever drawn-to-scale maps you personally find interesting. You can even augment Virtual Earth with Do-It-Yourself Aerial Photography. See our Gallery for more examples.
Maps become dramatically more useful when registered to Virtual Earth. For example, last year, Jeremy moved to Kirkland and wanted to commute to Microsoft by bike. Jon pointed out the useful Seattle bike map, which is available on line:
However, we couldn't figure out whether the bike trail crosses Interstate 405 at 60th Street, since the green line for the trail shows a break:
The answer can be found in Virtual Earth's aerial imagery, but it took us nearly 15 minutes to find this point in Virtual Earth, because we could only connect the two maps visually. Once we crunched the bike map into Virtual Earth's global coordinate system, a click of the mouse took us from the above image of the bike map to this one:
Mystery solved! A pedestrian bridge links bike trail across the highway.
MapCruncher makes it easy to publish maps overlaid on Virtual Earth. Once you are familar with the tool, it will take you about ten minutes to crunch a new map. Just find 5 to 10 corresponding landmarks on your map and on Virtual Earth, and MapCruncher will register your map to the global coordinate system, warp it to fit a Mercator projection, and generate a set of image tiles that can be seamlessly mashed up with VE's standard road or aerial imagery. It even makes a sample HTML page to show you how to use your mashed-up map.
MapCruncher accepts a variety of vector formats (PDF, WMF, EMF) and raster formats (JPG, PNG, TIFF, GIF, BMP).
System Requirements
The MapCruncher application requires Windows XP or Server 2003. It also requires the .Net 2.0 runtime, which it will install if necessary.
Installation Instructions
Run the downloaded installer. You will be promped for an installation directory. MapCruncher will be added to the Microsoft Research group in the Start menu.
Project Members
Project Lead
Jeremy Elson
Primary Developers
Jeremy Elson
Jon Howell
Contributors
Danyel Fisher
John Douceur