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