Location Services and APIs on the HERE platform
In previous blog posts, we covered setting up your HERE platform account, took a quick tour of the platform, and then looked at creating and authenticating an app. This post will examine HERE location services and APIs available on the platform.
Location, location, location
When it comes to location related business problems, there are typically four distinct areas of inquiry:
- Answering specific location related questions
- Solving complex location problems
- Providing contextual awareness for different situations
- Enabling location in your applications and overall business
The HERE platform provides building blocks to address these inquiries without a need to understand the infrastructure and algorithms of the blocks themselves. It does this by catering to tasks that allow the application of a map or app using location services, using location service logic on your assets, or the customization of logic to configure how a service returns its results. The value prop here is avoiding recreating or writing bespoke software and making your own rules around service integration within your solutions, and allowing the freedom to bring your data (BYOD), map, services, and logic for location-based enrichment.
An overview of HERE location services
Within the main components of the HERE platform are REST API location services, an industry standard for web services. As covered in last week's blog post, authentication of these uses industry standard bearer tokens or API keys. There are also JavaScript APIs and SDKs for extending your capabilities, and the platform allows user management of these API’s, such as cost estimation and seeing the number of calls made:
HERE location services are also highly available and scalable, operating on a 24x7 basis, 365 days per calendar year with guaranteed response times and most SLA’s offering 99.9% monthly uptime. Customers with support plans get additional SLA (Service Level Agreement) components, such as service credits & reports.
Some APIs are offered in multiple clouds (AWS, Azure) and web service APIs (RESTful) have an aligned data model, field names, return codes, etc., that are backed by global map data.
The development enablers include not just SDKs but also development tools to extend and build custom solutions.
Available Services
HERE location services are grouped into several buckets organized by theme:
- Map rendering
- Routing
- Geocoding & search
- Tour planning
- Positioning
- Transit
- Fleet Telematics
The availability and usage of individual APIs will vary by plan type (see usage rates below). We offer 40 services under the Base plan with the Limited (free) plan requests capped. A full breakdown of Features, APIs and SDK’s can be found here. Follow this link for coverage and availability of HERE location services.
To quickly access a services summary, status, and reference information, you can go to https://platform.here.com/services
Selecting a service from the list provides an overview, versions and the API reference tabs among other service specific information:
Service Usage Rates
As noted, API requests are dependent on what plan you have. Either free, daily, with RPS (Request Per Second) limits or a pay-as-you-go model. Please refer to the service rate breakdown for service transactions for base plan or the general overview for both the limited and base plans. Please refer to this blog post for an in-depth explanation and overview of the two plans.
How to add a service to a project
Now that we are up and running, let us look at how to add a service to a project (demo below). Think of projects as containers for your resources on platform that you use to build apps and services. They offer benefits such as collaboration, cost tracking and access and workflow management. Each project allows up to 100 resources. Resources include catalogs, pipelines, schemas, and services. To add a service to a project we first need a project:
- Select the Projects Manager from the launcher
- Select your project or create a new project
- Once created, under the resources tab select Services
- Click Link a Service
- Search or browse to the service and click Link. The selected service can now be used and will show in the services list in the resources tab of the project.
Similarly, the steps for removing a service from a project are as follows:
- In the Projects Manager, click the project you want to remove a service from.
- On the Resources tab, click Services.
- Click the three dots to the right of the service you want to remove and select Unlink.
Making your first API Call
Now that you are set up, you can make your first API call! There are many service specific tutorials in the documentation, for example, try a simple route calculation with the HERE routing API.
If you are brand new to the process of making service requests, you can use a free tool like Postman. Checkout this page on how to do this. This is also a fantastic way to verify your access keys!
Hope you found this helpful! Stay tuned for more blog posts! Feel free to leave a comment or reach out to us on Twitter at @heredev, we are excited to see what you are building with the HERE platform!
Other Resources:
Domain names for HERE services.
Identity & Access Management Guide
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