Where? Burien Streetcar 1911 Survey Map

Developer: Robert Ketcherside

The Mashup

Created by Seattle native and local history buff Rob Ketcherside, Burien Streetcar features an overlay of a current digital map with a 1911 map detailing plans for a streetcar line that once connected the city of Burien (near present-day Seattle-Tacoma Airport) with Seattle. Ketcherside combined historic maps from county archives with Virtual Earth™, state-of-the-art mapping software powered by the Microsoft Windows Live™ Platform. MapCruncher, an application from Microsoft Research, was used to import and align the maps, enabling the combination of road and aerial imagery from Virtual Earth with the archival 1911 streetcar map.

Why the Windows Live Platform?

Windows Live was the only integrated platform that enabled map overlays without having to invest in 3^rd-party add-ins or expensive graphics applications. While Windows Live can serve as foundation for very complex web sites, Burien Streetcar illustrates how easy it is to build straightforward mashups in a few easy steps.

Programming Environment

Developer Ketcherside used a simple text editor (Microsoft Notepad) to create and edit the code for Burien Streetcar.

Under the Hood

Virtual Earth and MapCruncher work together to generate the final displayed mashup. MapCruncher registers the archival streetcar map (which can be submitted in a variety of vector or raster image formats) to the global coordinate system. It then processes the result to fit a Mercator projection, and generate a set of image tiles that are seamlessly combined with Virtual Earth road or aerial imagery. The resulting “crunched layers” are returned for display.

The following code snippet shows how to call Virtual Earth and MapCruncher:

<script src="http://dev.virtualearth.net/mapcontrol/mapcontrol.ashx?v=5" type="text/javascript"></script>
     <script src="http://research.microsoft.com/mapcruncher/scripts/v5/CrunchControl.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

The layered map results are stored on the web site:

<div id="Map"></div>
<div style="display:none">
<a id="CrunchedLayers" href="http://www.zombiezodiac.com/rob/hplb/maps/1911/MapLayers.crunched.xml">CrunchedLayers</a>
</div>