The New Bing Maps Features

 

Coming back after the holiday season with a lot of energy, the Bing Maps team kicked off 2012 with releases of a new routing engine and the WPF control. Today–only 2 weeks later–we are now announcing several new features in the Bing Spatial Data Services and the Bing Maps Account Center. New features include a data source for traffic incidents, the ability to find points of interest (POI) along a route, wildcard-searches in your POI, incremental updates of POI data sources, improved reporting and more. Happy New Year! Are you feeling the love? Smile

The Bing Spatial Data Services provide a REST interface that allows you to geocode or reverse-geocode your own POI data sources in batch-mode, manage these data sources and query your own or some public POI data sources that Bing Maps provides in a spatial context.

Finding Traffic Incidents Along a Route using the new Spatial Data Services Query

In this release, we added the following features:

  1. Incremental Upload - Your own data sources now support incremental updates by setting the parameter ‘loadOperation’ in the Data Source Management API to ‘incremental’. So, once you’ve uploaded a data source of X number of locations into the Spatial Data Service, if you just want to add a few records you can just send those few records. We’ll handle the add and update functions for you!
  2. Wildcard Searches - New Query Options support wildcard searches through filter criteria. Let’s say you want to query your data source to find the nearest locations around a point AND you want to filter the results based on the beginning or end of a keyword. For example, let’s say you have a “Store Manager” field in your data source. You can look for said manager by last name, “%Smith” or first name “John%” so you get all the Smiths or Johns within a region.
  3. Traffic Incidents - Traffic Incidents for North America are now available as a public POI data source and can be accessed through the Query API. Now the traffic incidents you see on Bing Maps are available to you in your applications via a spatial query.
  4. Find Near Route - The Bing Spatial Data Service supports now an additional spatialFilter which allows you to search for POI along a route. This is a game changer. Let’s say you’re a coffee company and you want to empower your users to have the ability find all your locations along their drive from, say Seattle to San Francisco…now you can! The Find Near Route Feature allows you to spatially query the points you’ve uploaded into SDS within a 1 mile buffer of your route.

http:// spatial.virtualearth.net /REST/v1/data/
439698230d90496596083f3fe7aafeb2/
TrafficIncidents/
TrafficIncident
?key=[YOUR_BING_MAPS_KEY]
&$format=json
&jsonp=callbackFindTrafficIncidentsNearRoute
&spatialFilter=nearRoute(’47.678558349609375,-122.13098907470703′,
’47.60356140136719,-122.32943725585937′)

You will find a complete sample using the Bing Maps AJAX Control version 7 for visualization, the DirectionsManager class for driving directions, the TrafficLayer class for traffic-flow information and the Bing Spatial Data Services for traffic-incident information along a route here. Alternate versions of the SDK are available in PDF and .chm format, as well.

Note: Neither the Wildcard-search nor the spatial-filter ‘nearRoute’ are supported with the public data sources NAVTEQNA and NAVTEQEU.

The Bing Maps Account Center is the portal through which you can find information for development with Bing Maps, and also manage your account. It contains links to interactive and traditional SDKs, a facility to generate Bing Maps Keys, a web user interface to manage your own POI data sources and a reporting service through which you can retrieve statistics about your Bing Maps usage.

In this latest release we added the following features.

  1. Additional data validation has been introduced for the upload of your own POI data sources.
  2. Before it was already possible to add and edit records in a data source that you uploaded through the portal. You can now also download and delete data sources.M32small
  3. Image capturing adds now additional security during the generation of Bing Maps Keys.M33small
  4. Additional reports have been added to provide more details on the use of specific Bing Maps Keys.M34small

We certainly hope you’re feeling special (and spatial!). We’re investing quite a bit of energy into Bing Maps and hope to see some killer apps.

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Lucas on Grabbing Happiness

 

“If America is the pursuit of happiness, the best way to pursue happiness is to help other people.”

– George Lucas (1944 – )
American film director, producer and screenwriter

Sales evaluation…

Do your actions…

  1. create a positive buzz about you and your work?
  2. make others want you as a part of their team?
  3. make your employer cringe at the thought of losing you to a competitor?
  4. make your customers excited about referring you to their colleagues?

You want your actions to scream value without the need for you to say a word. This is where you want to be – with those in your company and industry – and with those to whom you’re selling.

This is what creates true economic and job security – the value you and your team create for others.

This is care (what it’s all about).

When you have the opportunity over the next few days, set a reminder to review these four questions at the end of each month. Then, give yourself a little (objective) attention by reviewing them and creating an action plan to improve in each area where you feel you should.

Easier said than done… still needs to be done.

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Einstein on Give > Take

 

“The value of a man should be seen in what he gives and not in what he is able to receive.”

– Albert Einstein (1879–1955)
Swiss physicist

Sales kick off…

This week, focus on giving more for the dollars you earn (with your effort, with your product/ service) and you’ll find more will come your way. It may not always happen as quickly as you’d like, but it’s the better bet in the long run.

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Artistic 3D Visualizations

Today I want to highlight the work of the Senseable Lab at MIT, from a brief review of their work I’d say they seem to specialise in the area of real time 3D visualization and sensor input.

Beautiful Design Ideas: From an artistic ‘this is a work of art’ point of view their ideas are novel, fun and highly engaging, see this TED talk for examples
I really relate to the water building, I hang out on the South Bank in London and there’s a similar water sculpture there that is hugely popular (clip). Also, I’d LOVE to have some of those helicopter pixels in my lectures to illustrate geography concepts like earthquake waves to students.
Artistic 3D Visualizations of Singapore: This year the Sensable team have produced a project collecting real time data from Singapore and visualizing it. Here are some examples as a clip:

 

Looking from the angle of information communication there’s lots to like:
  • Engaging animations. The graphics draw the viewer in to find out more, they’re certainly engaging and artistically beautiful. I’m sure their exhibition at Singapore Art Museum was a sucess.
  • Elegant Time lines: They show time as a playhead moving against a timeline or against a bar chart illustrating relevant data. These elegant graphics are minimalist and communicate effectively without making the animation too busy visually. In a lot of ways they remind me of Tufte’s sparklines.
  • 3D Data Visualized Well? I’ve previously praised their technique in the of visualising 3D data using altitude, color and opacity at the same time as a way of getting over the problems of 3D thematic maps.
Beautiful but Ineffective? However, I worry that beyond looking attractive, these visualisations fail to communicate the data effectively. Two example issues that occurred to me:
  • Double 3D = Busy: In the heat vs energy consumption visualisation I think trying to show 2 sets of 3D data at once with the top layer of data partly obscuring the bottom layer doesn’t work well.
  • Where’s the Rain?: In the rainfall taxi visualisation by having the rain plot in 3D above the ground its difficult to relate where its actually falling on the ground.

I raise these issues without any evidence that they are actually problems, the only way of doing that is to conduct users tests. On the research page of the Singapore project Sensable discuss technical innovations and I admit in a real time visualisation project these are significant and important. However, there is no mention of user tests, given the amount of time and money that has gone into producing these animations wouldn’t it be a good idea to find out if they actually work?

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