After our Mass Transit announcement last spring, UMI has been heads down, ingesting, normalizing, (re)validating, researching, verifying, and updating piles of mass transit-related information. Today we’re announcing the first of several key initiatives around public transportation: the Mass Transit Proximity API is born. Similar to our Neighborhood API, any bit (byte?) of content can be associated with relevant neighborhood (and now mass transit) information. A technical demo is available to help developers with documentation. Massively useful for business listings, real estate listings, mobile applications and a variety of other uses. We maintain an extensive collection of data elements and have several more exciting related announcements we’ll be making over the next few weeks. This one is the tip of the iceberg.

Why is this interesting/of note? Let’s say you run a real estate website. You have listings, demographic data, schools data, quality of live issues, etc…But what is the nearest subway station or bus stop? The Mass Transit Proximity API allows interactive publishers to append their content with UMI’s mass transit info, so that apartment for sale on 35 Charlton Street in Manhattan would have Houston Street Station (1, 2 train) and Spring Street Station (C, E train) associated with it. Sexy, no, but useful, massively. Do this with 100,000 new real estate listings per month or 15m business listings and there’s something consumers will like.

-The official news

Another day, another milestone…

Our neighborhood database now includes over 2,400 cities across 50 states (and a few territories). We continue to increase breadth and depth, supporting enterprise customers and startups leveraging our Neighborhood API. International coverage continues to grow, and more news shortly!

The official word

This just in…Umibot is pleased to announce a few enhancements to our Neighborhood REST API…

In addition to our significantly-increased neighborhood coverage
we’ve responded to developer requests and enhanced the REST API’s getNeighborhoodByLatLng to offer the option to return zero-to-one results, as opposed to the default zero-to-n results.

Why does this matter? Particularly in urban areas, neighborhood boundaries are organic, complex and because they are culturally defined phenomena. They are often with overlapping and/or hierarchical, and sometimes vague spatial relationships.

If you are enabling local search for your records, associating them with multiple neighborhoods will provide your users with more search options. However, some application developers want to know the neighborhood for a particular location. For this case, users can rely on our algorithms to take into account the underlying spatial relationships and geometries of all the neighborhoods which include the point to provide the best answer in response.

A final minor enhancement:, we have added ‘distance’ field to the result of ‘getNearestNeighborhood’ representing the distance to the centroid.

[Background Music: Begin Dirge]

Please note that we are deprecating the SOAP API. We have observed that the complexity of SOAP clients causes far more headaches for our end users, and our development overhead is not insignificant. As a small team, we have decided to focus our energy on expanding our coverage, and enhancing the REST API in response to user feedback. If you haven’t already, we encourage you to move over to REST.

After some hard work/late nights and prodding from the geo-techno elite, we’ve humbly completed and are pleased to offer RESTful access to our neighborhood API.

What does this mean for developers? Probably less time spent developing and more time doing. Since we offered the SOAP-based free neighborhood API last month, dozens of individuals and companies have signed up, and we’re confident this announcement will spur another wave.

We’re also thrilled to be using Mashery to manage our multiple APIs. Ciaran and team twisted themselves pretzel-wise to get us up and running in no time at all. Calling Mashery ‘on demand’ is exactly what what they offer, and it’s what they delivered.

The news release with a quote from Brady Forrest and other goodness.

Urban Mapping’s Ian White will participate on a panel, Online Maps: Plotting the Direction of Local Search, at the annual SES Chicago Conference & Expo at the Chicago Hilton, December 3-7.

This morning at the TechCrunch40 Conference Urban Mapping announced its latest customer–we’re thrilled to count Microsoft among the portals that utilize UMI’s products. Now may every man, woman and child find their way through congested and urban areas!

We’ve been offering SOAP-based web services for several months, but only just now realized that only UMI staff and our first customer know of the API’s existence. It’s exciting for us to offer this service (actually, several services) so smaller organizations can tap into Urban Mapping’s geo-platform without paying enterprise-level fees. We offer a broad range of methods and have modularized design, anticipating future needs.

Users can geocode to neighborhood by long/lat, postal code and use a variety of other useful methods when granularity/precision matters.

So what does this mean for you? For starters, you can enjoy our wonderfully-designed and easy-to-use documentation, but it gets better. We also offer a technical demo with code snippets (in PHP, Ruby and XML) that will bring you joy. Learning to use our services for geocoding by long/lat, postal code and other methods is now within reach!

If you are interested in learning more, play for yourself or let us know.