The last two days we’ve been setting up a demo integrating the National Geographic MetaLens service with Virtual Earth. It’s now live and can be seen at: http://www.metalens.org/mlve/.

MetaLens is a geospatial content management and archival system that National Geographic uses to secure and manage it’s content. “Out of the box” it has a Flash interface, but it also has a nice REST interface. We built some server side code that requests the public assets in the current view, and then applies clustering. At this time, the site is only fetching images, but we expect to extend the demo to include audio and video as well.

Map Tools

What’s a map without some tools? The Zoom To tool allows you to hop over to a location where there is some data of interest.

For Lake Tahoe, we have added in a Parcels layer that comes from an ArcDeveloper.net Tile Service.

For Vermont, we have a map from National Geographic being tiled using the same code base.

You can toggle these layers on and off using the Map Data command on the toolbar. We have also added a Base Map drop down that allows you to select which of the VE base layers to view.

What’s on the Server Side

The main app is a ASP.NET with a data provider class library that actually talks back to the Metalens service. I really like this pattern because it allows us to test the provide completely independently of the web site itself. Basically we just wire up some unit tests, and then via TestDriven.net they are automagically re-run when we build that class library. Sweetness.

MetaLens

MetaLens is built on a product called Clear Path Explorer (CPX) built by a local Fort Collins company called Clear Path Labs. Their web site talks more about CPX, and it’s API. From out brief experience working with it, it’s pretty nice.

Tile Services

Not surprisingly we are leveraging the ArcDeveloper.net Tile Service. At this time we are just pulling in 2 services, and both use the ArcGIS Server SOAP tile provider. The only wrinkle is that one service is hosted by DTS in our Fort Collins office, and the other is on a National Geographic server.

I have to give a big shout out to my colleague Mike Juniper who did an awesome job tracking down a bunch of CSS weirdness, and put the final polish on the site. We knocked this out in about 2 days start to live. Amazing what you can accomplish these days! There are still a few strange things in IE6, but that’s pretty much how it is with that browser. Works great in IE7 and FireFox.