Mapping leads the charge in mashups... plus a cool example
The ProgrammableWeb posted a piece on May 5th that mentions they now track 3000 mashups on their website. What is interesting is they break down the numbers and it turns out that 39 percent of these mashups are mapping in nature. While the term mashup entered into popular use through the music industry, the explosion of mapping on the web, especially through Google Maps and Yahoo! Maps has been one of the driving forces of mashups and has helped bring the term to a wider audience...read on!
As the APIs for these mapping applications mature, one will see more and more examples of "mashing" together of geospatial data from various sources (it will get easier and easier for less technically inclined folks as well). One particularly cool mashup developed by Map Channels is called Dual Maps. What is interesting about this is that it pulls together two very different sources of geospatial data from Google Maps and Microsoft's Virtual Earth imagery. Google Maps (and now Google Earth) have the cool unique feature of StreetView, while Microsoft has the unique and cool Bird's eye view. But until Dual Maps came along, you could not display this type of imagery together. Now you can, but there is much more. Dual Maps allows for lots of customization and then allows you to embed your custom map into your web page or blog. Its quite nifty. Having the best of what Google Maps and MS Virtual Earth offer side by side is very nice. And it all happens in the browser so you don't have to worry about platform issues (Virtual Earth is Windows only - not surprising). While Dual Maps is not overlaying data onto these maps, it is mashing together two different map sources to increase the value of the geographic information.
So if you want some inspiration and or a nice tool to add more dimensions to your online mapping, check out Dual Maps, its very unique. In addition, Map Channels has other projects that you might find useful or interesting. Keep in mind that StreetView and Bird's Eye view imagery may not be available for your area. Many areas are mapped with this technology, but there is still much more to do.
Keene Haywood (Univesity of Texas @ Austin)