Book Image

Learning Bing Maps API

By : Artan Sinani
Book Image

Learning Bing Maps API

By: Artan Sinani

Overview of this book

Provided as a part of Microsoft's Bing suite of search engines, Bing Maps is a web mapping service powered by the Bing Maps for Enterprise framework. The need for geospatial data has increased dramatically in the last few years. Adding a mapping context to any location-based data is becoming more and more common, and businesses are embracing it to improve their user experience with new data richness. Comprising of simple, follow-along examples, Learning Bing Maps API will show you how to use the many features of Bing Maps, from dropping a simple map on a web page, to fetching geospatial data from the Microsoft servers. Through the course of this book you will build a solid foundation for creating your own geo-applications.Following the hands-on recipes of this book, you will build a different web app in each chapter as you communicate with different APIs provided by Bing Maps. You will build your own library of JavaScript modules that talk to the Microsoft Maps API.You will create a custom theme for the map, with your own controls. Taking advantage of the global reach of Bing Maps, you will learn how to build a route scheduler for a delivery company in Madrid, Spain, and then you will discover how to create jobs on the Bing Maps servers for geocoding addresses in California, USA. By the end of the book you will have learned everything you need to know to embed a map on a web page, with your own geo-data, or data obtained by the Bing Map Services.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)

Chapter 5. Spatial Data Services

So far we have worked with relatively small sets of data; for larger collections, Bing Maps provide Spatial Data Services. They offer the Data Source Management API to load large datasets into Bing Maps servers, and the Query API to query the data.

In this chapter, we will use the Geocode Dataflow API, which provides geocoding and reverse geocoding of large datasets. Geocoding is the process of finding geographic coordinates from other geographic data, such as, street addresses or postal codes. Reverse geocoding is the opposite process, where the coordinates are used to find their associated textual locations, such as, addresses and postal codes. Bing Maps implement these processes by creating jobs on Bing Maps servers, and querying them later. All the process can be automated, which is ideal for huge amounts of data.

Please note that strict rules of data usage apply to the Spatial Data Services (please refer http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg585136...