There’s a new API from Google (News - Alert) that will make it much easier to come up with and share custom-made maps, such as online store locators.

Not surprisingly, it’s called Google Maps Engine API (application programming interface).

The API lets enterprises or other organizations “develop on any platform — Web, Android (News - Alert), iOS, server, GIS software, etc. — to build endless kinds of applications, like store locators, crowd-sourced maps, or asset management apps,” according to the Google Developers Guide. 


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They could be shared with the general public, employees or clients.

“The API provides direct access to Maps Engine for reading and editing spatial data hosted in the cloud,” Jen Kovnats, product manager, Google Maps for Business, added in a recent blog post. Among the envisioned applications are store locators, crowdsourced maps or crisis-response maps.

Examples offered by Kovnats include how FedEx.com employs the API “to query its more than 50,000 retail locations and IRIS creates applications for utilities to track underground pipelines.”

“By integrating features that so many people use every day, like Google Street View and driving directions, FedEx.com visitors can easily find the nearest FedEx,” FedEx IT Manager Pat Doyle explained in a recent blog post. “Google Maps Engine gives us another big advantage: global accuracy and consistency. Central to the cloud-based offering, we can rely on Google’s core infrastructure to host our always-changing and growing database of store information. By hosting attributes, such as street addresses, opening hours, holiday schedules and local pick-up times on Maps Engine, we can update details for nearly 50,000 retail touchpoints in real-time and share this information to FedEx.com visitors within minutes.”

News of the new API was reported widely in the media.

The older Google’s Maps Engine has been commercially available for about a year, TechCrunch said. TechCrunch adds that the older version of Maps API “mostly focuses on giving developers access to Google’s own mapping content. The Maps Engine API is meant to handle developers’ own data.”

ZDNet points out that the Google Maps Engine API is a RESTful API. That means “all requests to the API are HTTP requests. Thus, any programming language with an HTTP library can be used to query or modify data in this API,” ZDNet said.

Overall, Google Maps was recently described by TMCnet as “one of the most successful and widely used apps ever created by Google.” Google Maps is integrated with more than 1 million websites, and will integrate Google Now, the TMCnet report adds.