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.

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.