Azure Maps Geocoding Service
With the help of this set of REST APIs, developers can quickly determine the latitude and longitude of any geographic location, including a store, a home address, a city, a state, or even regional borders.
With the help of Azure’s web SDK, the service makes it simple to integrate Azure Maps Geocoding and reverse geocoding capabilities across platforms, such as iOS and Android. The flexible and quick JSON replies offered by Azure Maps API enhance the end-user experience. Azure Maps offers location-based capabilities that can give your application a competitive edge.
The API for Reverse Geocoding
Reverse Azure Maps Geocodingis a feature of the API that lets you enter any set of latitude and longitude coordinates and have it translate them into a city location, street address, or even a geographic boundary.
Polygon Search API
An area outline’s polygonal data can be obtained for a region, city, or postal code, among other geographical areas. Try to find places that are inside the designated circular or polygonal region(s).
Fuzzy Search API
The geocoding APIs are capable of processing even the most ambiguous inputs, such as a mix of addresses, locations, and sites of interest, and they can also retrieve their coordinates. Additionally, the API can geoparse pertinent locales by being weighted or entirely limited by certain coordinates or a search radius.
Point of Interest Search API
For local points of interest, search for their coordinates by name or category, including eateries, parks, public transportation, attractions, and more. Among the information seen in search results are the address, coordinate location, and classification.
Search Along Route API
While navigating a designated path, find the coordinates of pertinent sites and places of interest.
Batch Geocoding API
You can use the Geocoding Batch API to batch up to 100 geocoder searches with a single API call. To convert a large number of coordinates into addresses and then normalize and check them, you can also use batch reverse geocoding.
Worldwide Location Intelligence
Azure Maps provides you with the best global geospatial mapping available. Take advantage of Azure Maps geocoder’s excellent worldwide coverage and smooth platform interaction. From mapping to logistics, asset tracking, and efficient service delivery, the Azure Maps Geocoding service is essential for many uses.
Azure Maps Search API
Azure Maps Geocoding can be used in conjunction with other Search REST APIs to enable user services in your application by querying the spatial database for addresses, local sites of interest, and other locations.
Autocomplete
This service can tolerate typos and partial geographical names rather well. You can utilise the Geocoding APIs to find the most relevant contextual match for your search in the event of misspellings, which will allow you to obtain precise coordinates.
The initial step in gaining location intelligence is geocoding
The Microsoft Azure Maps suite of location and mapping APIs allows businesses to incorporate location intelligence into their products. Among the most popular Maps APIs, the Azure Maps Geocoding Service allows addresses to be geocoded (that is, converted from textual addresses into geographic coordinates) and vice versa. A coffee shop’s name or address, for instance, 1124 Pike St., Seattle, can be transformed into latitude and longitude coordinates of 47.61403, -122.32820, so that it can be depicted on a map or utilised to compute distance measurements.
In location intelligence, geocoding is one of the most important phases since it lays the groundwork for all other sophisticated location analytics that can be carried out after addresses have been precisely drawn on a map. After determining the location of the coffee shop, for instance, you can locate the closest supermarkets or other interesting establishments.
Microsoft has been investing in geocoding services for decades in order to give Its enterprise customers the best product in the market and to leverage them across its product portfolio, which includes Bing, Microsoft 365, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Windows, and more. Businesses utilise Azure Maps’ geocoding service for batch geocoding, which enables them to quickly geocode several data points at once. Adding location information to databases to build cross-platform, mapping-based online and mobile applications is one of the most popular uses for geocoding.
What makes Azure Maps geocoding the best option?
Data coverage and accuracy Azure Maps provides country, city, street, address, and other granular regional-level data coverage worldwide by sourcing data from several reliable data providers. In order to consistently lead the industry in coverage and accuracy, it geocoding services have been utilising state-of-the-art AI for more than ten years. To expand it global coverage, they are thrilled to announce that, as of November 12, 2024, the Azure Maps geocoding service will serve South Korean addresses in compliance with the regional data residence requirements.
Compliance, scalability, and security Azure Maps takes advantage of Azure’s larger security and scalability architecture since it is natively hosted in Microsoft Azure Cloud Services. Consequently, it effectively combines with Microsoft Azure Active Directory/Microsoft Entra ID and shared access signature token for authorization and authentication, allowing for strong identity management and access control. The FedRAMP, HIPAA, and other requirements are also followed.
As long as they have an active Microsoft Azure account, users can store geocoded addresses and coordinates for data enrichment using the Azure Maps geocoding API. This eliminates the need for users to pay extra for the geocoding service each time they need it for an address they already have.
In what ways do businesses use Geocoding Service?
Smooth delivery and quicker checkout Retail businesses use Azure Maps geocoding feature to improve the global shopping experience for their clients. Features like address autofill allow online buyers to swiftly check out and register their addresses.
Targeted marketing with customer insights The geocoding feature of Azure Maps is used by physical retailers and dine-in restaurants to find the nearest retail location for their patrons. With the help of that data, businesses may target sales flyers and email advertisements for discounts that are accessible to them if they visit the store.
Using Azure Maps’ geocoding tool, public health institutions, non-governmental organisations, and health insurance providers can visualise health outcome distributions on a map and assess the risks of possible viral epidemic scenarios for proactive planning. This enables them to monitor the uptake of vaccines and helps guarantee that therapy is delivered to the areas where it is most likely to have the greatest effect.
Analysis of location-based risk: The insurance sector needs to prepare for the “un-plannable.” In order to cover costs in the event that an item or person being insured is damaged, insurance brokers can determine the level of risk that an insurer must have covered by their policy by using actuarial data and predictive disaster models.
Fleet route optimisation: Azure Maps’ geocoding tool is used by logistics, shipping, and transportation firms to geocode addresses. By converting client and other addresses into latitude and longitude locations, the most efficient delivery routes may be determined, resulting in less fuel usage and more effective delivery schedules.
Begin Using Azure Maps
Through its interoperability architecture, Azure Maps allows you to connect to a variety of Microsoft services, including Synapse, Microsoft Azure IoT, Microsoft Fabric, Microsoft Power BI, Entra ID, Microsoft Azure Data Explorer, and Microsoft Power Apps. You can easily add strong mapping and location analytics features to your apps with little technical background.
Adding an Azure Maps resource to your project and using that instance to call Azure Maps APIs is all that is required if you already have an Azure subscription. To view price options for Azure Maps, go to the pricing page. Deploy your Azure Maps service into an existing Azure subscription with ease and pay just for what you need. Go here to create an Azure subscription if you don’t already have one, then follow the instructions.
What is a geocoding service?
The process of translating a location’s description, such as an address or place name, into geographic coordinates is known as geocoding. Additionally, geocoding services can translate a Place ID or latitude and longitude data into an address.
