Hi Wilfried,

I'll give it a shot

First, you need a subscription to access it.. you need credentials / an account / a login and password, all ways to say the same thing.

What it is is a map server / map generator farm some miles from Redmond. With your subscription you can programmatically ask the map farm to spit you back a gif image. You can ask for a map around a specific location, a store, or a lat/lon.

You can call it from just about anything that can call a web service -- just about any development environment has a library these days for calling a web service. VS .NET products (VB .NET, C# .NET, etc) have great web service support as well as ASP .NET, but even the Palm OS, classic ASP, VBA/VB6, can call a web service. So, from any of these varied environments, you can programmatically "get" maps and mapping functionality without installing any mapping software, i.e. a light client.

Probably the most well-known use of the MapPoint Web Service is to be the mapping engine behind retail store locators on company web sites such as at www.Starbucks.com, it also powers maps.msn.com.

hopefully this helps although I'm sure someone else can explain it better or more succinctly.
Eric

__________________