"As a Principal Architect for Bing Mobile, Steve will help develop better mapping experiences for our customers and partners, and lead efforts to engage with OpenStreetMap and other open source and open data projects," stated a Microsoft .

Coast founded OpenStreetMap (OSM) in 2004 as a to assemble a Web-based map of the world using free imagery. At last count, the project has gathered more than 327,000 contributors.

As part of the initiative, Microsoft is also donating a set of aerial imagery to OSM.

"This is a pretty big deal. Today, OpenStreetMap has a patchwork of imagery available that is sometimes good but sometimes not very high resolution or simply unavailable," Coast Tuesday.

The company also promises to develop a set of tools that will make it easier for OSM contributors to submit data.