The Maponics Spatial API reduces both time-to-market and implementation costs and makes it easy for organizations to add and improve geographic context.  With just a few lines of code, developers can leverage unique and meaningful map layers for reference, filtering and display.

Current and relevant data is central to many web and mobile services but managing the data on the back-end presents serious challenges.  Most companies don’t work with geographic data on a regular basis and therefore don’t have the skills or tools to do so effectively.  Further, obtaining, normalizing and integrating data from various sources is labor and time-intensive and must be repeated each time the data is updated.  Alternatively, requesting only the data needed by visitors/users—when they need it—(via an API) offers huge advantages.

The Maponics API is a RESTful web service that accepts simple requests in the form of plain text XML.  It supports a host of methods that include everything from a simple query containing a single lat/lon to large batches requests.  It can also return everything from simple attribute data to full sets of coordinate pairs (polygons) that represent things like Neighborhood Boundaries.

In coming weeks, we’ll add posts to this series that feature each of the datasets available through our API and get down to the nitty-gritty details about fields, use cases and methods.

But, if you can’t wait that long, check out the API datasets page for a complete list of the datasets available.  On this page, you’ll find details about which fields are available for each dataset and the methods that can be used to access them.