Retrieving Boundaries from the Bing Spatial Data Services (Preview)

The Bing Spatial Data Services (SDS) allow you to submit large amounts of addresses for batch-geocoding as well as GPS-coordinates for reverse geocoding. You can download the results or keep them in our data centers and retrieve your points of interest (POI) within a distance of a specific location or along a route through the SDS Query API. Aside from your own POI which you can manage through the SDS, you can also query POI from our public data sources which are grouped into categories.

These API and data are useful for a variety of scenarios and are most often used in typical "locator" scenarios where you want to find stores, dealerships, etc.

Today we are beginning to preview a new capability of the SDS which allows you to not only retrieve points but also polygons. Initially, this includes boundaries for countries, administrative levels and more. This new capability is exposed through the GeoData API and could be useful to highlight areas of interest…

RedmondPP.JPG
Get Single Boundary Sample for Redmond

…or create "thematic maps" where you color-code regions based on key performance indicators (KPI) such as the revenue, number of customers, crime statistics, environmental data, etc.

MultipleZipSDS.JPG
Multiple Boundaries with a Boundary Style applied

So, rather than talking about different parameters let’s go straight into a sample where we retrieve a polygon and utilize it in the Bing Maps Web control?

Sample 1: Page through results in a data set. 

As Developer I know we all have done anything we can to stay awake to finish that last bit of coding before release. For this sample, FourthCoffeeSample - Bing Maps | Microsoft Learn. we have a ficticious company "Fourth Coffee" with a number of locations surrounding Microsoft (How convienent!)

PageResultsSDS.JPG
Page 1 of "Fourth Coffee" shops

Page2SDS.JPG
Page 2 of "Fourth Coffee" shops

FourthCoffee.JPG

Sample 2: Cloropleth map of US State boundaries. 

This code example, Choropleth Map Example - Bing Maps | Microsoft Learn, retrieves US state boundaries from a Spatial Data Source that contains US census data. These boundaries are color coded based on the population metric.

bmv8-sdschoroplethmapexample-1.png


We have a lot of ideas on what we want to add in the future, but we always welcome your feedback on what works well and what else you would like to see. Please let us know via the forum.