Virtual Earth Web Services and MapPoint Web Service provide location data for a wide selection of countries. The age and detail of map tiles vary depending on data availability. Individual services, such as bird's eye view, have more limited coverage areas. Microsoft strives to provide the latest available data in both Virtual Earth Web Services and MapPoint Web Service. Through MapPoint Web Service, many countries can gain access to localized map annotations.
Imagery is updated and expanded regularly. See the most recent updates.
Virtual Earth Map Control
Street and Routing/Directions Coverage: The Virtual Earth Map Control and the Virtual Earth Web Services contain road coverage for a number of 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, but 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 and regions outside of the nine primary coverage areas and uses the Virtual Earth Web Services in North America and Europe. For details on the street and routing coverage in Virtual Earth Map Control and MapPoint Web Service, see the MapPoint Web Service geographic coverage details.
3D, Bird’s Eye, Aerial and Satellite Imagery Coverage: The Virtual Earth platform contains 3D terrain models available globally with a number of international cities boasting textured building models[1] with more to come. Unique bird’s eye imagery coverage is available for approximately 30 percent of the U.S. population and for parts of the United Kingdom. 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 is continuously adding imagery in new areas and updating coverage in areas of existing coverage.
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, ZIP), Virtual Earth Web Services, which support 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.
MapPoint Web Service
Using MapPoint Web Service's SOAP API, Virtual Earth platform customers can utilize maps for 67 countries/regions in 15 languages, including:
- 50 countries/regions in Europe.
- Four countries in North America and the Caribbean.
- Three countries in South America.
- Five countries in the Asia/Pacific region.
- Five countries in Northern Africa.
MapPoint Web Service does not contain aerial or bird's eye imagery. Maps are returned as image files and can be rendered in various application types, but support for panning and zooming must be implemented by the customer.
For more information on what regions are covered and in what detail, see the MapPoint Web Service geographic coverage details.
MapPoint Web Service Geographic Coverage Details
Coverage by region includes:
- Four countries in North America and the Caribbean
- Three countries in South America
- Five countries in Asia Pacific region
- Five countries in Europe
- Five countries in Africa
1. Available in many metropolitan areas.
