Location data in Spatial Data Services and Rest Services differs

Question

First I am calling Spatial Data Service query by id api.

https://spatial.virtualearth.net/REST/v1/data/f22876ec257b474b82fe2ffcb8393150/NavteqNA/NavteqPOIs('1001529628')?$format=json&key=?

Next I'm calling Rest Service location api with latitude longitude from the above response.

http://dev.virtualearth.net/REST/v1/Locations/47.6396,-122.39935?key=?.

Spatial service gives first line : 3220 McGraw St

Rest service gives first line   : 3220 W McGraw St.

Rest fields are same.

Why is the 'W' (i am guessing it stands for West) missing in the first response?

Answer 1

Of course they will differ. They are complete different services that do different things. The NAVTEQ data sources are points of interest data sources. This data comes from a point of interest data provider. The Location service is for Geocoding and reverse geocoding. When reverse geocoding a coordinate is used to return an approximate address. This is powered by the primary data set for Bing Maps and is likely to be much accurate when it comes to addresses.

Note that there is another POI service for Bing Maps called the Bing Maps SOAP Search service which has a lot more data than the NAVTEQ POI data source, and is has a lot more global coverage.

---

http://rbrundritt.wordpress.com

Answer 2

Hi Ricky. Thanks a lot for your quick reply. 

My use case requires Type of Address data that seems to be returned by Spatial Data Services api only. But address data  is more accurate from Rest API. I need both and hence planning to call both APIs and merge the data. But it will cost me two calls per address. Can you suggest any better plan?

Thanks in advance. 

Answer 3

If doing this in client side code with an interactive map then you can make use of a session key from the map to make these calls non-billable. If using the Bing Maps v7 control take a look at the map.getCredentials function. Here is a blog post on this: http://blogs.bing.com/maps/2012/02/01/bing-maps-reporting-tips/

If you are using these services to generate a list of sales lead information or mailing list you should be aware that this is against the terms of use of Bing Maps. Here is what the terms of use list as a restriction:

Use Content that consists of points of interest data to generate sales leads information in the form of ASCII or other text-formatted lists of category-specific business listings which (i) include complete mailing address for each business; and (ii) contain a substantial portion of such listings for a particular country, city, state or zip code region.   

---

http://rbrundritt.wordpress.com