Bing
Bing is a search service from Microsoft, which includes other wings of operation including the Bing Maps platform. This is the primary map offering from Microsoft. It was previously known as Microsoft Virtual Earth. It includes maps, map embedding APIs, routing etc. This is all powered from their proprietary datasets licensed from various geodata providers, much like google maps, yahoo maps, mapquest.com (the main map portal), and pretty much every other map provider out there. The maps you think of as "free" are all heavily restricted by expensive licenses... however
Bing Maps are investigating working with OpenStreetMap in various ways:
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Bing aerial imagery in OpenStreetMap editors
Bing have declared that we are allowed to trace from their aerial imagery for OpenStreetMap.
You are not allowed to copy from Bing's streetmaps - only their aerial imagery (i.e. the overhead pictures taken from a plane or satellite). Streetnames and other names are not part of the aerial imagery, and may not be copied.
How to use in the editors
Potlatch 2
Select 'Bing' in the 'background' drop-down (top-left).
(Bing Imagery is not available in Potlatch 1, and probably won't ever be.)
JOSM
Update to the current josm-tested (or any version from 3715 onwards) which has bing imagery available built-in
Zoom in to an area and on the new 'imagery' menu, select 'Bing'.
Merkaartor
In Merkaartor (0.17 and later):
- Create a new layer via the menu Create → Add new Image layer. If you already have an image layer, skip to the next step.
- Change the image layer's source to Bing via the menu Layer → Map → Plugins → Bing.
Source tag
Use source=Bing. (This is OSM policy, not a Bing requirement.)
Coverage
See Bing/Coverage to find out and help document areas of coverage available.
Coverage analyzer
A modified version of the Bing analyzer is available here: http://ant.dev.openstreetmap.org/bingimageanalyzer/. This one will draw a coverage map of hires imagery. You have to zoom in to zoom level 14 or more to discover high resolution tiles, which will then result in green and red tiles indicating availability of imagery being rendered in all zoom levels. See discussion.
Age of the aerial pictures
At this webservice you are supposed to see when the Bing material has been recorded: Bing imagery analyzer for OSM [1] Zoom in and out to see even different ages of each zoom levels! See discussion.
Precision
Be aware that at lower zooms, Bing's imagery may be misaligned. I.e. alignment is not consistent across zooms — at one zoom, you'll be aligned, but another, you'll be misaligned. This is different than other image sources, including Yahoo, which if misaligned tend to be consistently misaligned irrespective the zoom you're using. This is true of various places worldwide.
Areas with height differences (mountains, hills, bridges) seem more prone to this, which suggests that imagery was not always taken at a precise 90 degree angle. As a result, objects at the same height (ground level in a flat area) may be quite precise while objects which are higher (embankments, bridges, buildings) or lower (cuttings) may be slightly off.
Use GPS tracks to calibrate the aerial images.
- See Talk:Bing for more ground tests.
- See Topic "Bing maps is misplaced" in the OSM-talk mail list; initial posting item link from 7 December 2010, or the entire thread from Gmane's OSM-talk archive.
- True Offset Process - ideas for for building a database of correction offsets
Announcement and licence
'Microsoft imagery details' on opengeodata.org, and 'Bing engages open maps community'
See File:Bing license.pdf. This was valid on 3rd December 2010 and may be superseded by later issues of the licence issued by Microsoft.
Please note the only legal use of Bing maps is as background to do your own OSM drawing (also known as "tracing"). It is not legal to use any other information from Bing maps (like street names, street view etc).
Background Information
Robert Scoble has a blog post on his visit to Bing's imaging center. It is not technical in nature, nor does it really provide any particularly reusable information - but is still a nice read.
2012 Censorship of military areas in Germany
In the end of January 2012 bing blurred many military bases in Germany after being asked by the German government to do so. The polygons of the these areas were given to Microsoft by the German government. It is suspected that these polygons could have been exported from openstreetmap, since several blurred areas are perfectly matched to landuse=military polygon.
The details are collected on Bing/2012 Germany Military Blurring
[17:52] <SteveC> I have asked our imagery people about the blurring [17:52] <SteveC> And I can pass back that we were asked to do it by a branch of the German government [...] [18:22] <SteveC> I can confirm that the blurring polygons were given to us by the government and we didn't use OSM or anything like that.
Other OpenStreetMap Bingnitiatives
Road Detect API
Bing announced access to an experimental service which can automatically derive street vector data from Bing aerial imagery. Given a start and end point, the service will attempt perform image processing to recognise the position of a road, and return vector data for it.
See Bing road detect API for more details
OpenStreetMap via the Bing Maps APIs
They have added an OpenStreetMap layer to their platform. This can be viewed on http://www.bing.com/maps/explore/#5003/s=w/5872/style=Mapnik&pid=50735 (requires Microsoft Silverlight 3 - Moonlight 2 (latest stable release as of Dec 2010) will not work) and is available in the "map apps" area.
See also "Microsoft launch an OpenStreetMap Mapnik layer on Bing Maps" Announced Aug 2nd 2010
FrontDoor addressing project
Bing's frontdoor.cloudapp.net connects street addresses with their associated buildings. You can help out by moving a pointer on an aerial photo to the front door of the building. The address data will be used in Bing and donated to OSM, though there are no details on how this will happen (or currently is happening) TODO: please update if details are published.
This is a micro task presented to the user repeatedly. It's simple and perhaps a little addictive, like a game. It does not require a login, and may work on some smartphones. Tools for casual contribution have great potential for reaching out to new people who are put off by the complexity of OSM editing.
