Bing Spatial Data Services – Next Gen Spatial Search Comes to the Bing API

In August of 2001, we released the MapPoint Web Service that introduced spatial search and data hosting capabilities for our users. Since then, large and small businesses, government agencies and non-profits have used the service to support geospatial functionality such as store locators, fleet tracking, and real estate applications for their customers.

Today, we launched Bing Spatial Data Services, adding next generation spatial search to the Bing API offering. This release offers the benefits of cloud hosting and distributed computing, allowing customers to upload their data to our servers and perform spatial queries under the umbrella of their existing Bing Maps License.

Here’s a little more detail about what the service does and how it works.

– Geocode Dataflow API (Batch Geocode):

  • Use it to batch geocode large sets of data (upload a process a then download)

– Data Source Management API (Load):

    • Use to load, manage (update, delete) data for long term hosting.
    • Data can be in a file or a Windows Azure™ Blob Service location.
    • Load is required before being able to query with Query API.

– Query API (Spatial Query):

    • Used to query hosted data; a query response can contain a maximum number of 250 results (the new Bing Maps AJAX v7 makes light work of displaying large numbers of points on a map)

By Area <aka FindNearby>:

· Either specify a center point (radius search) or bounding box to search for matching entities. Use built in filters to refine the response. Results are “as the crow flies”. Example:

How many matching entities fall within this specified area (circle or rectangle)?

By Property:

· Search a hosted data source for one or more entities by specifying property values. Example:

Return all entities (customers) with sales person John Smith.

By ID:

· Specify an entity ID and receive in response all related information for the given entity. Example for Contoso Corporation:

For entity of ID “Contoso Store 1200”, return all associated property information (store #, address, open times, WiFi, etc)

For entity of ID “Contoso’s Best Coffee Store 5”, return all associated property information (store #, address, open times, WiFi, etc)

For more details, you can check out our documentation, or sign up for our upcoming webcast on March 1st. Try it out and let us know what you think.

Max Artemov
Senior Program Manager
Bing Mobile

The Lost Archives of the Google Geo Developers Series

Back in December of 2009, five leading scientists from the American Geophysical Union trekked
to the remote Google office in downtown San Francisco. Lost until now, the video of their
presentations have resurfaced. So, for the first time ever, we present, the Lost Archives of the
Google Geo Developers
Series

Jeffrey Cardille of Universitie de Montreal discusses , a new
virtual globe application for the submission, storage, and sharing of point-based ecological
data.

Thijs Damsma of Deltares discusses his use of KML to visualize coastal data.

Ross Beyer of NASA and SETI discusses his work visualizing Mars data
and imagery using Google Earth.

Tyler Erickson of Michigan Tech Research Institute discusses his tools for to visualizing 4-D atmospheric carbon monitoring data using KML and Google Earth

Yaxing Wei of Oak Ridge National Lab discusses his Spatial Data Access Tool which enables visualization and access of geospatial data using
OGC services and Google Earth.

Posted by Mano Marks, Geo APIs team

SDI for Everyone

The topic of verbose metadata versus youtube-style metadata (a title and a video) in the context of Spatial Data Infrastructures is not new. Even publishers of geospatial content struggle with the verbose metadata standards that have been created over the years. Those metadata standards were not written with data discovery in mind. They resulted from the need for analysists to fully understand the data they were about to use to ensure it fit their purpose.

With the advent of the content sharing sites like Youtube or Flickr content sharing no longer was limited to the scientific/professional