MapForums

The World Olympics kick off August 6 in Beijing, China with a football match. Inline with CCTV's interactive Microsoft Virtual Earth map-based application for Euro 2008, today, The BBC News has published their BBC Sport's Olympic Map which uses Microsoft Virtual Earth for a back drop of tons of Olympic event and local Beijing information. This is a pretty great application for browsing the events and their locations by sport using different icons, with custom enhanced rollovers (EROs) to specify the event and fill the EROs with pictures and event information. What makes this application even more interesting is the MapCruncher overlay of the venues.

The inclement weather and a thick cloud layer over Beijing for the last few MONTHS, it has been incredibly difficult to get good satellite imagery. This makes the MapCruncher overlays a huge benefit to the application. The imagery we're serving up was taken just a few months ago - obviously tons of progress has been made to the get the stadiums ready for August, but what a great addition to compliment the Virtual Earth platform.

As a bonus, Ollie Williams wrote a blog post about the experience of building the Olympic Map. Well done BBC.

CP