Bing Maps can be used to track everything from assets to fleets to family members to the Abominable Snowman (as Virtual Earth) and maritime crime.
Piracy Watch is a demonstration application built on Visual Fusion 4.5, the latest release from Microsoft partner, IDV Solutions. Visual Fusion is visual mashup software for the enterprise, a platform for creating interactive, visual applications utilizing the power of Microsoft’s Bing Maps, SharePoint, and SQL Server. Piracy Watch visualizes piracy incidents around the globe from 1978 to the present, displaying the data in both a map and a timeline. The two contexts of place and time work together as an integrated canvas for exploring the data, and users can navigate in both contexts.
Piracy Watch leverages Microsoft Silverlight for a sleek and dynamic user interface. The visualization also includes a heat map for the 30+ years of content to give immediate at-a-glance understanding of what parts of the world have been most impacted by this activity. The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency maintains this data as Anti-Shipping Activity Messages.
Piracy events are represented by a red dot. Mouse over a dot to get a brief summary of that event. Click on it and details are provided in the right pane.
In typical IDV application fashion, Piracy Watch features a set of tools from a drop down menu that includes, to name a few: a timeline tool that plots the events by month and year, a lat/long sensor that allows you to get coordinates when mousing over locations, and--get this--a built-in screen capture tool. Love that.
Sail on over to IDV's demo web site for an impressive bounty: Piracy Watch deomnstrates how Bing Maps, Visual Fusion 4.5 and Silverlight can be integrated for a flagship of a tracking application.
-= Virtual Jerry
This post was mentioned on Twitter by bingmaps: Tracking Piracy in Bing Maps using Visual Fusion 4.5 http://bit.ly/7AiJa3
