You’re planning a party and want to make it easy for your guests to get there. Not a problem, you think: You’ll just send them a map they can use to find their way.
But that can be more challenging than it seems. Because guests are coming from all directions, a map with sufficient context would have too little detail available near the destination. And a map that shows the last few turns to the destination would cover too small an area to get people to the neighborhood. All of a sudden, you have a problem.
Now, though, thanks to work by Johannes Kopf and Michael Cohen of Microsoft Research Redmond and their colleagues, a solution is at hand. In fact, their work, called Destination Maps, has been incorporated as an application plug-in, part of an array of enhancements newly available through Bing Maps: Simply click the Map Apps button at the bottom of the Bing Maps page and select the “Destination maps” app.
Destination Maps are automatically generated to enable anybody within a region to be able to navigate to a specific location. The technology simplifies the details necessary to navigate to your intended destination by highlighting only those highways, main streets, and side roads necessary to get to where you’re going. At the same time, the neighborhood around the destination is enlarged in context.
A “hand-drawn” Destination Map.
from Rob Knies more here