untangling_the_web

DOCID: 4046925
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At the end of 2006 Microsoft announced Virtual Earth 3D, which offers truly
stunning views of many US cities. The downside of this technology is that it requires
Internet Explorer and certain other Microsoft-specific software in order to run.
Microsoft Research, in partnership with the Government of India's Department of
Science and Technology, is working on an interesting project powered by Microsoft
Virtual Earth technology. According to the website, "The primary goal of this project
is to explore novel and effective ways to collect and disseminate geospatial data and
leverage multi-lingual technologies within maps. We currently have fairly limited
data-1:1 M India-wide data as well as 1:8000 Bangalore city data. naa
Right now, the only street-level maps are for Bangalore; users cannot add pushpins
(I tried unsuccessfully to view them but neither the annotation nor street search was
working). However, the concept is a good one. Imagine having street-level and
perhaps even aerial maps of an entire country in all that country's languages. Even
now, you can view the maps in English, Hindi, Tamil, and Kannada, although
Microsoft does caution there are inevitably errors in their rendering of the place
names. There is no doubt this is an interesting experiment and I feel pretty confident
MS didn't pick India randomly.
Here's a shot of a portion of Bangalore rendered in Hindi:
Virtual India
Virtual earth
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