Virtual Earth Academic Research Collaboration
Virtual Earth, available at http://local.live.com, provides an online mapping service that enables users to search, discover, explore, plan, and share information about specific locations. Moreover, by its use of traditional road maps, labeled aerial photo views, low-angle high-resolution aerial photos, and proximity searching capabilities, Virtual Earth provides unique opportunities for developers to incorporate both location and local search features into their Web applications, now including 3D maps.
Virtual Earth is encouraging academic research in areas relevant to digital geography, 3D graphics, computer vision (particularly as relevant to terrain and cityscapes), visualization, and tagging, including such topics as:
Spatio-temporal data structures and algorithms
Map-related algorithms
Search-related algorithms with a geographic component
Real-time traffic analysis and route-finding
Ontologies, tags, including content rating, reviewing, and event organizing
User interfaces
We believe research in the above topics can be highly enriched by the availability of imagery assets. Data gathering is still an expensive proposition today, and this RFP directly addresses the need for more data. By making data assets available to academia, Microsoft seeks to encourage innovation around information visualization, location-based searching, discovery, and sharing. It is hoped that increasing the availability of relevant, large data sets from Virtual Earth will enrich the development of exploratory analysis and algorithms which aim to directly or indirectly enhance the user experience for local Internet search.
