Map Cruncher

While making the rounds at the Location Intel Conference, our GeoPDF Evangelist Phil Lee met some some Microsoft cat working on the very cool Map Cruncher. I don't know who the particular cat in question was, as Phil likes to play his cards close to the vest, but from the site, it looks like there are four hackers involved. The project lead is Jeremy Elson. Jon Howell is listed as a primary developer. Danyel Fisher and John Douceur are listed as contributors.

One of the slick things about Map Cruncher is its use of either an affine or quadratic polynomial approximation to do a quick-and-dirty rectification/reprojection for more-or-less arbitrary imagery. There's more in the tutorial. Transforming arbitrary data into geospatial data good enough to be practically useful is a huge step forward.