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MapPoint Web Service Customer Data Sources

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IMPORTANT: MapPoint Web Service was retired on November 18, 2011. Please see https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd877180.aspx for a list of current Bing Maps APIs.

You can upload two kinds of data sources to MapPoint Web Service for use in your applications:

  • Location data sources Data sources that contain one or more records, called entities, where each record contains information about a single location. Each location is defined by a pair of latitude and longitude coordinates. This type of data is also called point data because each entity defines a single location, or point, on the surface of the Earth.

  • Polygon data sources Data sources that contain one or more records, called entities, where each record contains information about a geometric region that is defined by at least three vertices. Each vertex is identified by a pair of latitude and longitude coordinates. MapPoint Web Service renders the polygon by drawing the implied edges that connect the first vertex to the second, the second to the third, and the last one to the first. (The implied edges cannot cross one another.) This shape defines the exterior ring of the polygon. If the polygon contains other polygons, the boundaries of those polygons are called interior rings. MapPoint supports only one level of nesting. A polygon can have multiple interior rings, but interior rings cannot have other polygons inside them.

Each data source is limited to a single type of geometry: You cannot mix location data and polygon data in one data source. And you cannot change the geometry type of a data source after the data source is created. A data source must have a user-assigned entity type that is the same for every entity in the data source.

You can have up to 25 data sources on the MapPoint servers (staging and production) at a time. By using multiple data sources, you can use different data sources for different types of geometry; different types of data (such as gas stations versus convenience stores), different chains within a parent company (such as two hotel brands), or different purposes within your application.

You can upload location and polygon data sources in the following ways:

  • Use the Create button on the Home page to define and upload a new data source file.

  • Use the Customer Data Service upload methods to upload data source files programmatically. This is the best option if you want to define scheduled uploads. For more information, see the MapPoint Web Service SDK.

  • Use the Data Upload Client sample (DataUploadCS.exe) to upload files by using a command line. This sample code is included in the MapPoint SDK.

You can delete or copy location and polygon data sources by using tools that are provided on the Bing Maps Customer Services site (CSS). Use the icons next to the name of each data source on the Home page to delete or copy your data sources. Location data sources have an additional icon that you can use to access a set of Web pages for editing the content of those data sources.

Because you can edit location data sources, you can also download the changed files. You can download location data sources in the following ways:

See Also

Concepts

Downloading a Location Data Source Using the Command Line
Public Data Sources
Uploading a Data Source Using the Command Line
Uploading a Data Source Using the CSS
Understanding Geocoded Results