The Virtual Earth platform provides location data for a wide selection of countries. The age and detail of map tiles vary depending on data availability. Microsoft strives to provide the latest available data. Imagery is updated and expanded regularly. See the most recent updates.

 

Street and Routing/Directions Coverage: The Virtual Earth Map Control and Virtual Earth Web Services contain road coverage for many countries worldwide. The road tiles are rendered from the same data source as the maps in the MapPoint Web Service. Tiles can be rendered with English, French, German, Italian, or Spanish labels in Western Europe, and they share the same data set as MapPoint Web Service.

 

The Map Control and Web Services also use the MapPoint Web Service for routing/directions in the Australia-Pacific region, and in areas outside of the nine primary coverage areas. Virtual Earth Web Services is used in North America and Europe.

 

For details on the street and routing coverage in Virtual Earth, see the Virtual Earth geographic coverage details, and for the MapPoint Web Service, see the MapPoint Web Service geographic coverage details.

 

3D, Bird's Eye¹, Aerial and Satellite Imagery Coverage: The Virtual Earth platform contains 3D terrain models available globally, with a number of international cities featuring unique bird's eye¹, or 45-degree-angle, views. A growing number of cities also feature textured street and building views.

 

Orthographic aerial and satellite imagery is offered worldwide through the Virtual Earth Map Control and the Virtual Earth Web Services. Coverage varies by region, with the most detailed coverage in the U.S. and U.K. Coverage in different areas within a country also varies in detail based on the availability of imagery for that region. Virtual Earth continuously adds imagery in new and existing areas.

 

Geo-coding/Address Lookup and Parsing: The Virtual Earth Map Control and Web Services APIs provide the ability to do geocoding by passing an unparsed address string to the Find service. Virtual Earth returns the result of the geocode, and may prompt the user with possible matches in the event of an ambiguous query.

 

If your application requires geocoding of pre-parsed addresses (those broken into defined fields like city, state, and zip code), Virtual Earth Web Services, which supports this need, may be a useful addition to your application architecture.

 

MapPoint Web Service also provides facilities for batch geocoding of large numbers of addresses, as well as reverse geocoding for returning information on the location attributes of a particular latitude and longitude.

 

 

 

1. Available in many metropolitan areas.