The Bing Maps team is running a King of Bing Maps contest.  Chris Pendleton just published a blog post on Bing Map App Development Resources over on the Bing Maps blog.  If you aren’t familiar with Bing Map Apps, they are mini applications you write in Silverlight that become part of the Silverlight version of Bing Maps.

http://www.bing.com/maps/explore

You have to submit your app for approval.  Approved apps show up in the Map Apps gallery:

You bring up the Map Apps gallery by clicking the “MAP APPS” button in the left pane of the Bing Maps UI:

Map Apps are a great way to visualize open Government data that has the necessary location information. So far, I haven’t seen many map apps do this other than the Bing Health Maps application:

I’m keeping my fingers crossed that some of the apps submitted will use publicly available Government data as the source for Bing Map Apps.  Will you be the person to submit one and win?  I hope so.

Don’t know where to get publicly available Government data? You can find a few over on the producers page of http://odata.org as well as http://data.gov.  Most of the Government OData services on the producers page of http://odata.org use the OGDI starter kit created by my team.  If you are a Government organization that wants to make your data publicly available on the internet through an OData service, then OGDI is a great way to get started.