The Ordnance Survey is the UK's national mapping agency. They have a history of leading the way in surveying technology and digital map products. However, their digital products also have the reputation of being very expensive.

Recently, the Ordnance Survey launched their "free" OpenSpace service to allow users to add interactive maps to websites. This article is an overview of this service.

Today, MetaCarta announced the release of version 4.5 of their Geographic Search and Referencing Platform (GSRP). GSRP is a geographic search platform that can also interpret and tag natural language with geo-location information.

MetaCarta are describing v4.5 as a major upgrade with enhancements to the Geographic Data Module, tagging, connector, custom gazetteer, JavaScript SDK; plus support for OpenSearch.The Natural Language Processing (NLP) engine has also been upgraded to improve the disambiguation of human names from place names. Geotagging enhancements include centers of higher education, plus improved neighborhood and partial street address tagging. The JavaScript SDK enhancements include native support for OpenLayers, Bing Maps, and Google Maps.

Further information can be found on MetaCarta's GSRP pages.

Earlier today, Microsoft launched a significant upgrade of their Bing Maps service with the addition of "Streetside™", "Enhanced" Bird's Eye, and Photosynth views. The main Bing Maps site ( http://www.bing.com/maps/explore/ ) has been moved from JavaScript AJAX to the Silverlight 3 control.

The enhanced Bird's Eye views switch to 3d building models for urban areas. Non-urban views now include 3d terrain models (eg. mountains).

Technically, the PhotoSynth additions do not not add anything new, but the interface is now native. Select "PhotoSynth" from the legend, icons will appear letting you "dive right in" to a Photosynth.

This all sounds great, and the user interface feels slicker with the new Silverlight 3 version. The only downside with the new version is that I found the controls were not as initially obvious as they used to be. I think this is a combination of design/colors, as well as the fact that they've changed and I was simply used to the old controls.