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Just last night I read an editorial that suggested that GIS had stepped into the role that surveyors cover in recent years. “GIS professionals started edging into areas that had previously been relegated to professional surveyors.” (POB Editorial, July 2009)
It’s called the Directions Web Service and it’s supposed to be easy to use.
As I understand it, you include a simple call and can get back “a JSONP response containing the directions narrative data and then fires the defined JavaScript callback function in your app. You then have the flexibility to display the information in your UI however you want.”
There’s some nice features:
- you can submit the request in several formats and get it back in a different one
- queries can be quite complex
- the service can help eliminate ambiguous addresses (or not)
- response can come verbose or in performance encoded form for enhanced speed and small size
- more to come
There’s no cost for the service, but you do need a free developer license key.
