After catching up on my blog reading (131 separate blogs), I was reading the Microsoft Research News and Headlines blog and came across this entry: the Data Mountain. I watched the video and liked the idea of a spatial map as a metaphor. And as the creative juices got flowing I thought “hmmmm, I've got MapPoint installed why not create an imaginary map of my local machine”?
Here's the concept: You create an map of your local machine (or your network), and use a MapPoint to locate objects on my drive. The “map” will be based off of a single drive size. Therefore you get a finite size based off of actual drive size. If you have multiple drives on your box they could be shown as states.
The map could have “towns” that contain information. Think of your favorites folder being a town. And as more objects are contained within the “town” it can grow in size just like a city.
So there's the concept. Here's what I've run into so far.
1. How to get MapPoint to read a non-North America map.
2. How to create a new map. (I'm sure people would love to be able to create fantasy maps.)
3. How to hack the following files to create that new map. USADemo.mdb and USAGeom.DAT I'm guessing that the USADemo contains data like where restaurants, banks, schools, etc. are and the USADemo is the file used to create the actual map of the US.
Let me know if you can help.
Sean