Microsoft launches Bing Maps Time Zone API

The Microsoft Windows Time Zone standard and the IANA time zone standard provide a well-defined structure for representing time zones used across the world. However, time zones change more frequently than expected. A country or administrative region may change the time zone they are using. Other regions change the way they apply daylight saving time. Not surprisingly, working with time zones can easily get complicated for software application developers.

The new Bing Maps Time Zone API is a collection of five easy-to-use REST APIs that are designed to make it easy for developers to work with time zones. Both Windows and IANA standards are supported. The API will cover most of the scenarios that developers must deal with when working with time zones.

Most time zone APIs available today require latitude, longitude as input. This typically requires an additional step for developers to obtain the geographical coordinates of a place before being able to obtain the time zone information. Instead, the Bing Maps Time Zone API provides a one-stop solution enabling developers to work directly with their locations. Given a place name e.g. “Seattle, WA” or “Taipei” the Bing Maps Time Zone API will return time zone information of that location. If the given location has multiple time zones all of them are returned as a list. For the cases where latitude, longitude information is already available, the Bing Maps Time Zone API will return the time zone information for the corresponding location.

The Bing Maps Time Zone API is available for use with your existing Bing Maps key. It supports JSON and XML formats for return values.

For more information, contact Grey Matter Ltd, the authorised Bing Maps distributor.
www.greymatter.com/bingmaps