Microsoft Research demos interactive map of India

Microsoft Research demonstrated Thursday the prototype of a multilingual interactive digital map of India at a research symposium in Bangalore, India.

The development is the offshoot of an agreement in January last year between the Indian government and Microsoft Research’s lab in Bangalore. The prototype uses Virtual Earth technology from Microsoft, which also powers the Windows Live Local mapping and geographical search service.

The prototype of the digital map, called Virtual India, will be available online to the public later this week on http://research.microsoft.com/virtualindia/ in a number of Indian languages, Padmanabhan Anandan, managing director of Microsoft Research India, told reporters in Bangalore.

Users will be able to access the Web site and add annotations such as titles, descriptions, pictures, and tags to the map, that will also be available to other users to view. Modifications cannot however be made by the public to information added by the government to the map, Anandan said.

Currently the map has street-level detail only of Bangalore, but later Microsoft Research plans to add street-level detail for other parts of India as well.

To add content to the digital map, Microsoft Research India is experimenting with the model of the Wikipedia free encyclopedia run by nonprofit organization The Wikimedia Foundation.

“We would like the community to add content, and we expect the content to be self regulated by the community in the Wikipedia model,” Anandan said.

The ownership and management of the production version of Virtual India will be decided later by Microsoft Research and the Indian government and its agencies such as the Survey of India, Anandan said. Microsoft Research is also working with nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to provide relevant information on the map. The plan is to have third parties build applications that incorporate the service, Anandan said.

In his address at the unveiling of the prototype of Virtual India, Kapil Sibal, India’s minister for science and technology, said technology that enables information to be added to a digitized map can be used for a number of development objectives. In agriculture, for example, the digital map and additional information provided by local administrations could be used to keep track of data such as the kind of crops that are grown in each place, the type of soil, or rainfall patterns, he said.

The country did not have a policy for digital maps since its independence: the country’s defense ministry felt that such information should not be put in the public domain because of the likely impact on security, according to Sibal. Since then the country has realized that it needs digital mapping technology to address development issues and the needs of the common man, Sibal said.

The country’s new mapping policy now allows it to digitize its maps and put them on a web site, Sibal said. Information considered sensitive by the country’s defense ministry will not however be put up on the online maps in the public domain, he added.

A new national spatial-data infrastructure policy to be announced soon would allow private sector licensees of the government to use the maps, add relevant information, and make it available online to the public, Sibal said.