Events
Chris Pendleton
Microsoft
Senior Program Manager
Redmond, WA, USA
Chris Pendleton is a Senior Program Manager, Lead for the Bing Mobile team focused on new features of the Bing iPhone, Android and Mobile Web applications. Chris was the Bing Maps Technical Evangelist for Microsoft Corporation, has been with Microsoft for 8 years and focused on the location-based services and GIS industry for over 10 years. Chris specializes in all things Bing Maps and Microsoft geospatial including, but not limited to technological deep dives, web and mobile application architecture and development, licensing arrangements and 3rd party revenue opportunities. Chris has a long history of application development, architecture, consulting and deployment of large scale web-based applications, especially those using geospatial intelligence. Chris also authors the Bing Maps Blog and holds a Master’s Degree in Business Management from San Diego State University.
Abstract
bing maps
Bing Maps provides canvas for data visualization of environmental information.
Bing Maps is a data visualization canvas for rendering information about the world. As our environment changes it’s important to recognize these changes and visualize them for better analysis. Bing Maps has come to forefront to be a leader in developing applications to illustrate environmental information making it easy to understand.
Bing Maps provides developers with numerous options for visualizing environmental data. The Bing Maps APIs support overlaying vector information in latitude longitude form for rendering points (as pushpins), lines and polygons. Pushpin images are fully customizable by using either custom images or cascading style sheets. Line thickness and colors are customizable. Polygon border colors and thickness and shading are also fully customizable. Bing Maps provides support for overlaying raster information, as well. For large, high fidelity or complex polygons such as weather patterns it’s often more optimized to rasterize the data and overlay it.
For developers wanting to render data in an XML format, Bing Maps currently supports KML and GeoRSS, two fully endorsed Open Geospatial Consortium standards which have been widely adopted. Also, Bing Maps has been natively integrated into ESRI’s ArcGIS Server 9.3. This means any Geographic Information Services developer can easily and natively publish their GIS data to a Bing Maps application.
In order to work with Bing Maps, users have a choice of different technologies and application programming interfaces. Bing Maps offers and AJAX control for JavaScript developers; a SOAP service for server to service communication; a REST API for light weight communications via web or mobile; and, Silverlight for robust data visualization and high performance rendering capabilities.
The key features of Bing Maps include the highest resolution aerial photography in the world; the highest fidelity route geometry information; a unique Bird’s Eye (oblique) perspective of the world via angled aerial imagery; and a robust, yet simple set of APIs for adding layers and layers of geographic information atop of the map canvas.
Bing Maps prides itself on the accuracy of data, resolution of imagery, vintage of photos and simplicity for which to develop applications. The future direction of Bing Maps will continue to forge ahead adding new types of imagery (such as Photosynth) and allowing massive amounts of data to be published through the Bing Maps web site via Bing Map Apps.