Multimap :: Blog

We’ve been releasing a lot of new Aerial and Bird’s Eye imagery lately, so we thought it was time to do the same for our maps.

The keen-eyed among you may have noticed that we released maps of many new areas over the weekend on Multimap.com. We’ve combined our street level maps in Europe, with maps from Microsoft Virtual Earth that provide you with improved country and region level maps worldwide and new street level coverage of including…

Asia - Japan
Africa - Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, South Africa
Eastern Europe -Azerbaijan, Georgia, Armenia
Central and South America - Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Chile

These new maps are available on Multimap.com today, and will be available via our Multimap API for business customers and Open API for developers over the next few weeks.

Our friends on the Microsoft Virtual Earth team have also just delivered another 20TB of Aerial and Bird’s Eye images, which also includes some new UK imagery. A big thank you to them all!!

Enjoy!!

We announced last month that we’re partners for Mashed 08 which is taking place this weekend at Alexandra Palace. To mark this occasion we’ve added some new features to the Multimap Open API that many of you have been asking for.

• High Resolution Aerial and Bird’s Eye from Microsoft Virtual Earth - All the great imagery that you see on Multimap.com is now available in the Open API.
• Local Information - As well as offering direct access to geocoding, routing, and static map services through our web services API, we have today added the ability to directly query our local information databases through the same REST style interface. This will enable you to mash data such as cash points, transport links, wi-fi hotspots and Wikipedia articles into your applications. Special thanks go to TeleAtlas and TotalHotspots for helping to make this happen.

In the last week or so, many of you told us that you have wanted to build mash-ups with data stored in OSGB x/y co-ordinates and grid references that are tricky to use with mapping API’s such as the Open API (which only tend to support WGS84 co-ordinates). To help make this easier, we’re making available a beta feature that allows you transform these co-ordinates so that you can place them onto our maps. We’ve put it together so quickly, that we haven’t had chance to finish to documentation for it, but Richard’s blog has much more.

We’ve also taken the opportunity to smarten up the sign-up process to make it more straightforward to get an API key. Existing Open API users will need to go back to the sign-up page and update your API key to get access to the new features.

For those of you going to Mashed, we’ve created a cheat sheet that has links to all the Multimap and Microsoft tools you can use, along with code snippets and links to tools and libraries that others have built.

The final batch of tickets has been released, but you’ll need to be quick as the tickets we released went in a few hours.

There will be a bunch of us wandering around at Mashed all weekend wearing Multimap t-shirts, and hopefully we’ll camp out in a corner armed with beanbags and Xbox’s, so come over and say hello.

See you there!!

We’re delighted to announce that we’re partners for Mashed 08, and the next 100 tickets are available exclusively through Multimap and Microsoft. The event promises to be a great blend of hacking and mixing, with maybe even some sleeping thrown in. If you didn’t attend Hack Day last year, you missed out. I’d encourage you to make your way to Alexandra Palace on Saturday 21st June and get mashed.

So, the important bit. We have 100 tickets now available here. You’ll need the code, which is “microsoft”.

If you miss out, keep watching because more tickets will be released over the coming weeks. Hope to see you there.

The keen eyed among you may have noticed that we recently updated our maps in Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore. As these maps are supplied by our friends at Tele Atlas, they are also available within our Open API as part of Tele Atlas’s donation to the Open API community.

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Users of multimap.com may have noticed that, if you are in London, you have a choice of map styles. The good people from Harper Collins provide the local street maps that many Londoners are familiar with, while our friends at Tele Atlas provide many of the maps for much of the world that you see on multimap.com.

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You will have done well to miss the evolution of online mapping to use AJAX technology in recent years. Draggable (or slippy) maps have become the norm for users, and websites and the user experience are all the richer for it.

A strange time, then, to release new – wait for it – non-draggable maps? Maps that don’t move no matter hard you drag them? Maps that need pan and zoom buttons to move? So, why have we just released new API functionality that does just that?
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At Multimap we’re very proud of the wide range of local and global mapping data available on our website and through our API, and are committed to providing as much of this data via the Open API as we can. To that end, we’re very pleased to announce the availability of Ordnance Survey Landranger maps (at 1:50000 scale across zoom levels 13, 14 and 15) through the Open API.

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When you enter an address on multimap.com, we use a variety of sources of data, known as gazetteers, to try to locate what you are looking for.

“Commercial” gazetteers, such as those provided by our friends at Tele Atlas and Harper Collins, are great at providing “official” data, such as street names, postal codes and administrative areas. “Downing Street“, “90210” and “1er Arrondissement” are good examples of “official” data. The data is sourced, verified and released sometimes up to 4 times per year.

Many people search for common places of interest, such as “Big Ben“. There are also many searches for places that are not “official” administrative areas. “Bloomsbury“, “Hell’s Kitchen” and “Back Bay” are great examples of these. For all their strengths, commercial gazetteers sometimes don’t cater well for these types of searches.

Why are we telling you this? Well, we have now integrated GeoNames as an additional data source for address look-ups. You can see it in action not only on multimap.com, but also in the Multimap Open API.

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Well, this is quite an honor, to be given the first post on our new blog.

What should I discuss…?

Well, I could talk about our fantastic new site, but you’ve probably already seen that??!! (although have you seen our new OS maps and our eBay integration?).

Perhaps I could talk about our wide range of business services? You may not know that Multimap provides mapping services such as the Multimap API and mobile services to more than 1,200 business websites.

While I’m sure we’ll talk a lot more about these soon, today I’d like to let you know about something of great excitement to us all here at Multimap, which is the Multimap Open API.

We’ve created the Open API, which is based on the Multimap API, for developers to innovate, experiment or just try things out.

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