Windows 10: Bing Maps Local Insights API Now Available

Brink · Dec 18, 2018

The Bing Maps team is happy to announce Bing Maps Local Insights API. With the release of Bing Maps Local Search API earlier this month, we are excited to include another API to the collection.

Bing Maps Local Insights API is powerful REST API that provides insights into business and entities within a given area that can be reached by driving, walking or public transit within a given time or distance. Local Insights can help score the attractiveness of a location based on the proximity to points of interest, making it easy for you to determine how close you are to things that are important to you. For example, find out how many restaurants, bars, movie theaters, parks or other kinds of places are nearby and also take into consideration the predicted traffic at the time that matters most to you.

Other use cases can include a variety of real estate and commercial scenarios. e.g. you can profile neighborhoods (e.g., Restaurants, schools within walking distances etc.) to help house hunters identify the perfect neighborhood for a new home. Also, you candisplay a list of businesses such as gas stations nearby that could be helpful when planning for a new business location.

Local Insights can enable the following visualization scenarios on a map:

Show nearby businesses/ Points of Interest (POI) locations on a map based on Latitude/Longitude.

Cluster of business locations based on latitude/longitude to show the concentration of specific amenities in a given neighborhood or area

With the Latitude/Longitude information, you can use Bing Maps control to toggle the display of the businesses/POIs on and off.

Call Options

What makes the API so powerful, is that you can call it in a number of different ways such as:

Travel Modes - Walking, driving or transit.

Optimize - You can optimize by distance (miles or kilometers) or time (minutes or seconds). For driving travel mode, historic traffic data is considered which provides rush hour and non-rush hour traffic driving times.

Types (i.e. local or business categories) - Use the same category type IDs that are available in the Bing Maps Local Search API.

Waypoint - You can use coordinates or a query of a location. Also, Local Insights API uses a travel time/distance isochrone rather than a crow fly circle to find what is within that region.

Here is a sampe API call that gets a list of Local Insights that are Movie Theaters or Departments Stores within a 30-minute drive of the Redmond Microsoft Campus.

http://dev.virtualearth.net/REST/V1/Routes/LocalInsights?Waypoint=1%20Microsoft%20Way,Redmond,WA&TravelMode=Driving&Optimize=time&MaxTime=30&TimeUnit=Minute&cats=DepartmentStores,MovieTheaters&key={BingMapsAPIKey}

The example JSON output below shows that there are 20 department stores within a 30-minute driving time. The JSON response provides the names of the department stores and movie theaters along with the latitude/longitude for those locations so that they can be displayed on a map and/or the results can be aggregated for summary purposes. The JSON response also includes the geocode (latitude/longitude) for the Waypoint location (i.e., 1 Microsoft Way, Redmond, WA) that was submitted in the query.

To get started with the API, check out the documentation:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/bin...local-insights
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/bin...-insights-data

As always, we can’t wait to see what you build with the new API. To learn more about Bing Maps APIs and how to get licensed, go to https://www.microsoft.com/maps.

- Bing Maps Team
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Read more: Bing Maps Local Insights API Now Available | Maps Blog

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Brink · Dec 18, 2018

Bing Maps Location Recognition API Now Generally Available

Today, we are pleased to announce the general availability release of the Bing Maps Location Recognition API that we previewed in last month’s blog post. Supercharge your applications to provide users with more context about what is nearby. Given a location (latitude, longitude) the Bing Maps Location Recognition API returns a list of entities at the location. The different components of the API response provide a comprehensive description of the location. The API response consists of:

Business entities situated at the location. A wide variety of entity types are supported (e.g. restaurants, hotels, parks, gym, shopping malls and more).

Natural entities at the location (e.g. beaches, island, lakes and 9 other types).

Reverse geocoded address of the input location, with neighborhood and street intersection information where available.

Type of property (e.g. residential, commercial) situated at the location.

For more details on the entities returned please see the Bing Maps Location Recognition Entity Types documentation.

The Bing Maps Location Recognition API is a high-powered reverse geocoding service that is great for use cases where you want to provide users with insightful details about what is at or near a specified lat/long. The Bing Maps Location Recognition API helps answer questions such as what are the businesses and points of interest near a real estate property that I am interested in buying? What is the address associated with a given lat/long? Is it a private residence? What neighborhood am I in?

A good example of the Bing Maps Location Recognition API in use is the trip labeling feature of MileIQ. MileIQ is a leading mileage tracking app using the Location Recognition API to make it easy for users to label the start and end of their trips. The Location Recognition API is providing friendly names of locations visited by a user in their trip, using these suggestions MileIQ users can easily label their trips.

Get Started

We encourage you to try the Bing Maps Location Recognition API using your Bing Maps API key and explore the useful location data it provides for use in your applications.

For more information about the Bing Maps Platform, how to get licensed, and frequently asked questions, visit our website. Please connect with us on the Bing Maps Forum to share your thoughts and let us know what additional features you’d like to see us support.

- Bing Maps Team
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Source: Bing Maps Location Recognition API Now Generally Available | Maps Blog

Brink · Dec 18, 2018

Bing Maps Autosuggest API GA Release

Introducing the Bing Maps Autosuggest API, the newest addition to the Bing Maps REST services. The Autosuggest API is used to return a ranked list of suggested entities based on a user's partial query. The service can return three possible entity types: Addresses (including roads), points of interest, and businesses (currently available in the US only with new markets coming soon).

A maximum of ten (10) autosuggested entities can be returned per request, and the returned entities can be delimited by country and culture. The response can be specified for either JSON or XML format.

The Autosuggest API is designed to help developers populate online query forms such as delivery addresses as well as map search bars. Check out this e-commerce online ordering form to see an example of how the Autosuggest API can be used in JavaScript to populate a list of suggested addresses. Another great example of an Autosuggest API usecase is LinkedIn’s “Your Commute” feature. Moreover, autosuggested entities can easily be displayed using the Bing Maps V8 SDK. For an example using JavaScript, the Bing Maps V8 SDK, and Bootstrap, see the Autosuggest API Browser.

Check out Bing Maps Autosuggest API and let us know what you think. You can connect with the team at the Bing Maps Forums to share feedback and let us know what you would like to see next.

- Bing Maps Team
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Source: Bing Maps Autosuggest API GA Release | Maps Blog

Brink · Dec 18, 2018

Announcing Enhanced Security for Bing Maps API Keys

The Bing Maps Developer portal shipped a new feature allowing you to restrict access on your Bing Maps API keys to a set of domains that you specify. With this feature customers can define a strict set of Referrer values or IP address ranges that the key will be validated against. Requests originating from your allow list will process normally, while requests from outside of your list will return an access denied response.

Adding domain Security to your API key is completely optional and keys left as-is will continue to function as they do today. The allow list for a key is independent from all of your other keys, enabling you to have distinct rules for each of your keys.

Currently we only support exact referrer name matching, meaning if your browser or header request sends https://www.contoso.com/, please have your referrer name as: https://www.contoso.com/ in the whitelisting definition. We will support short urls in a future release.

Note: Wildcards are not supported when specifying your IP addresses. However you CAN specify an IP range.

To set your Allow list, follow these simple steps:

Sign into the developer portal with your Microsoft Account

Select the My Account → My Keys menu choice to show a list of all of your keys

Click the ‘Enable Security’ link for the key you wish to set restrictions on

For a referrer rule, specify a Rule name and Referrer, then hit the green ‘plus’ button to add it

For an IP Range Rule, click to the IP range tab, then enter a rule name and your desired starting and ending IP address

You can continue to add as many rules as needed for each key

Press the close button when you are finished.

That’s it! Note that it can take up to 30 minutes for these changes to take effect.

If you have questions or feedback for the team, please reach out to our Bing Maps Enterprise Support team at L: bmesupp@microsoft.com.

- Bing Maps Team
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Source: Announcing Enhanced Security for Bing Maps API Keys | Maps Blog

Windows 10: Bing Maps Local Insights API Now Available

Bing Maps Local Insights API Now Available

Bing Maps Local Insights API Now Available

Bing Maps Local Insights API Now Available

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