Urban Mapping: Developer Portal for Neighborhood-Based Data and Optimized Local Search Applications

Urban Mapping, Inc. (UMI) the leading provider of location-rich content for interactive applications, today announced the launch of a developer portal and free API for access to Urban Mapping's pioneering neighborhood-based information. The Urban Mapping API uses REST, or representational state transfer, an XML-based protocol for summoning Web services over HTTP. The Urban Mapping developer portal, located at http://developer.urbanmapping.com, and REST-based API enable developers to quickly and easily build applications that are designed with enhanced local search in mind.

The new developer portal also offers code snippets, a technical demo, documentation for SOAP and REST, a developer forum, and registration for the free neighborhood API and direct access to the industry-leading Urban Mapping neighborhood database which contains more than 25,000 distinct neighborhoods, each geographically defined. Urban Mapping data also includes more than 1,000 cities and towns in the United States. A Canadian and European product includes more than 100 cities.

"Since the introduction of our free neighborhood API last month, we've received a tremendous response from the developer community," commented Ian White, CEO of Urban Mapping. "With dozens of customers already leveraging our industry-leading neighborhood database for a variety of optimized local search applications, I'm confident that this RESTful implementation will have others running, not walking, to our developer portal."

White added that neighborhood boundaries are of significant value across the local search and interactive real estate landscape as they represent how users think about space, something ZIP code boundaries have proven woefully inadequate at providing.

Brady Forrest, geo-techno evangelist for the O'Reilly Radar, a technology- oriented publisher and conference chair, commented, "I'm impressed with Urban Mapping's responsiveness to the developer community. Only one month ago the company rolled out SOAP services, but heard the clarion call - give us REST or go home. I expect their release of neighborhood data to the geohacking community to have widespread effects across the net."

Because Urban Mapping already provides its core database to leading portals, companies within the search marketing ecosystem are able to leverage the same geographic definitions for the same geographic keywords. Using the Urban Mapping geographic definitions, smaller organizations can reap benefits previously unavailable to them.

Urban Mapping's Urbanware(TM) products enhance the value of local content for interactive platforms. Its flagship product, Urbanware Neighborhoods, is a database of informal space, is used by all major portals, map platforms and Internet yellow page publishers including Microsoft's Virtual Earth, Idearc's SuperPages.com, MapQuest and AT&T's YellowPages.com. The company also offers a database of mass transit systems and a novel geotargeting solution focused on the needs of local search. For more information about Urban Mapping, visit http://www.urbanmapping.com.

Urban Mapping and Urbanware are trademarks of Urban Mapping, Inc.

Contact:
Bob Stern
Urban Mapping, Inc.
Tel: 415-946-8170 x88

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Web site: http://www.urbanmapping.com/
http://developer.urbanmapping.com/