It shows in the office of Microsoft Research’s Jeremy Elson, where Howell is visiting one recent afternoon. As they chat, they are enveloped in maps. Every wall in Elson’s workspace is festooned with a variety of mapping imagery: here, a schematic representation of the Los Angeles metropolitan area; there, a King County (Wash.) bicycling map; on another wall, aeronautical charts of the U.S. West coast; pinned to a corkboard, maps of Microsoft’s Redmond campus. There’s even a “found” map of the United States on which the previous owner had painstakingly delineated a lifetime of travels.

It shows in the excited energy Elson and Howell display in discussing their cartographical devotion and the various ways in which a good map can rouse the imagination.

And it shows in MapCruncher, prototype technology they’ve developed that promises to revolutionize the way people use online maps.

"Mash-Up" Maps

There’s nothing else quite like it. MapCruncher enables a user to take existing road maps and aerial imagery and overlay particular, specialized maps to create unique mash-ups tailored to the user’s specific interests.

It’s quick, it’s easy, and – judging from the enthusiasm displayed by this pair of map aficionados – it’s fun.

“MapCruncher empowers anybody in the world to take whatever data is important to them,” explains Elson, the project lead, “and share it with everybody else in a format that makes all of these types of data interoperable.”

Adds John Douceur, who manages Elson and Howell and who, along with fellow researcher Danyel Fisher, made key contributions to the project: “We’re allowing people to take map data and overlay it to create a new interactive Web map.”

Download MapCruncher at the MapCruncher site

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