Getting a Precise Location in Virtual Earth

[thiruvasagamani]

Getting a Precise Location in Virtual Earth

Before this release, the Virtual Earth geocoding engine used a common and simple interpolation scheme. In essence, if the geocoding engine knew that the 1300 block of Main Street started at position (X1,Y1) and ended at (X2,Y2), then 1325 Main Street must be 1/4 of the way between those two points. While useful, that technique can often return results that are imprecise, particularly in areas where homes are not evenly spaced.

Developers who wanted more precise geocoding had an option, which is to use the MapPoint Web Services (MWS) to get the precise location of a street address, as described in the Precise Geocoding with MapPoint Web Service and Virtual Earth article.

This release of the Virtual Earth map control has a number of upgrades, including improved geocoding for the UK and Canada, improved address parsing, and a unified geocoding layer built into the Virtual Earth backend architecture that allows multiple address parsers and geocoding engines to be leveraged in order to return the most accurate information available, all through a call to the VEMap.Find method. This article looks at the new functionality available to developers in VE 6.2 by developing a sample application that explores the geocoding functionality.

Source : MSDN