Redmond, Washington — As part of an initiative to bring innovation and improvements to its Bing Maps, Microsoft has hired “Steve Coast” the man who fostered a great reputation in the geospatial community by founding OpenStreetMap, “a free editable map of the whole world,” the company announced Tuesday.
The software maker announced that Coast will be crowned with the impressive title “Principal Architect of Bing Mobile.”
“As a Principal Architect for Bing Mobile, Coast will help foster better mapping experiences for our customers and partners, and lead efforts to engross with OpenStreetMap and other open source and open data projects,” stated a Microsoft blog announcement posted Tuesday.
According to tech news site ReadWriteWeb, Coast, who will turn 30 next month, in 2009 was selected as the second most influential person in the geospatial arena by readers of leading geo publication Directions Magazine.
Coast founded OpenStreetMap (OSM) in 2004 as a collaborative project to assemble a Web-based map of the world using free imagery. At last count, the project has gathered more than 327,000 contributors. Coast also co-founded CloudMade, a company that provides application developers with a range of tools and APIs to create location-based applications for Web and mobile platforms, according to reports. He left that company in October.
This appointment is part of a Microsoft’s latest initiative to work with OpenStreetMap.
“As an initial step in this agreement, we plan to empower access to Bing’s global orthorectified aerial imagery, as a backdrop of OSM editors. Also, Microsoft is working on new tools to better enable contributions to OSM.”
It should be noted right here that this evolution does not mean Coast is turning his back on OpenStreetMap or the geo community in general. As part of the deal, Coast evidently made sure that Microsoft will be allowing access to its global orthorectified aerial imagery.
In a post on his blog, Coast said this is a pretty big deal. Coast says that he will be moving to the Seattle, Washington area to work on “maptastic things” as a Principal Architect at Bing Mobile and that Microsoft will be donating imagery to OpenStreetMap. Today, OpenStreetMap has a patchwork of imagery available that is sometimes good but sometimes not very high resolution or simply unavailable,” Coast wrote in a blog entry Tuesday.
Coast emphasized that associating with Microsoft does not mean that Microsoft owns OpenStreetMap any more than CloudMade or MapQuest does. For its part, Microsoft will be donating aerial imagery to the OpenStreetMap project.
“This is the first step of what I believe will be an awesome series of announcements from Microsoft,” Coast wrote.