Microsoft Research Maps or MSR Maps was a free online repository of public domain aerial imagery and topographic maps provided by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). The site was a collaboration between Microsoft Research (MSR), Bing Maps, and the USGS. It was under continuous operation from June 1998 until May 2012. It had 30,000 to 50,000 visitors per day as of January 2010. The site was renamed in 2010, prior to which it had been known as TerraServer-USA (formerly Microsoft TerraServer).
The site had black and white USGS aerial photographs of approximately 97% of the United States. In 2000, the USGS launched the new Urban Areas program, which will ultimately take high-resolution color aerial photographs of about 100 major American cities. TerraServer had Urban Areas data for 40 cities.
Read more about Microsoft Research Maps: History
Famous quotes containing the words research and/or maps:
“To be sure, nothing is more important to the integrity of the universities ... than a rigorously enforced divorce from war- oriented research and all connected enterprises.”
—Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)
“Living in cities is an art, and we need the vocabulary of art, of style, to describe the peculiar relationship between man and material that exists in the continual creative play of urban living. The city as we imagine it, then, soft city of illusion, myth, aspiration, and nightmare, is as real, maybe more real, than the hard city one can locate on maps in statistics, in monographs on urban sociology and demography and architecture.”
—Jonathan Raban (b. 1942)