Location Providers in the Map
The Location Provider matches the addresses or locations with the geographical coordinates (latitude and longitude) and is used in conjunction with the GeoLocation groups which provide the geocoding request to retrieve the data point coordinates.
When you make a geocoding request, the response returns one or more location resources that contain location information ordered by relevance. The more detailed information is used in the request, the more accurate the results will be. For example, if you are looking for Vienna, Austria, you need to provide the country name as well, because otherwise the first returned result would be Vienna, VA, United States. That's why concatenating a city name with a state or a region name and a country name will result in a more accurate geocoding. The location providers require a valid key to authenticate the requests, so the user has to fill it in in the ClientToken property.
The map supports the following location providers:
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MapQuestOpenAPILocationProvider—Uses the MapQuest Geocoding OpenAPI geocoding service to provide a single-line address and receive potential geographical coordinates of the geocoded location.The query arguments order is of a huge significance. In the example above, if you switch the query arguments to Austria, Vienna, the service will return no results.
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MapQuestLocationProvider—Uses the MapQuest Geocoding API geocoding service to provide a single-line address and receive potential geographical coordinates of the geocoded location.The query arguments order is of a huge significance. In the example above, if you switch the query arguments to Austria, Vienna, the service will return Vienna, Dooly County, GA, USA.
BingLocationProvider—Uses the Bing™ Maps Locations API to get location information about the requested address.