Has anyone found a more complete description of what the Bing Confidence Enumeration values actually mean?
I'm trying to reconcile the results against another source of address data that has confidence values such as City, Street and Specific Address, and I want to get a feel for where the Bing results sit on this scale. I'm using the RESTful API.
The MSDN documentation only states that "High = The geocode service has high confidence in the match." etc.
Based on the MSDN documentation, you will be able to find various values for this property. See: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff701725.aspx
Extracted from the documentation:
The level of confidence that the geocoded location result is a match. Use this value with the match code to determine for more complete information about the match.
The confidence of a geocoded location is based on many factors including the relative importance of the geocoded location and the user’s location, if specified. The following description provides more information about how confidence scores are assigned and how results are ranked.
If the confidence is set to High, one or more strong matches were found. Multiple High confidence matches are sorted in ranked order by importance when applicable. For example, landmarks have importance but addresses do not.
If a request includes a user location or a map area (see User Context Parameters), then the ranking may change appropriately. For example, a location query for "Paris" returns "Paris, France" and "Paris, TX" both with High confidence. "Paris, France" is always ranked first due to importance unless a user location indicates that the user is in or very close to Paris, TX or the map view indicates that the user is searching in that area.
In some situations, the returned match may not be at the same level as the information provided in the request. For example, a request may specify address information and the geocode service may only be able to match a postal code. In this case, if the geocode service has a high confidence that the postal code matches the data, the confidence is set to High and the match code is set to UpHierarchy to specify that it could not match all of the information and had to search up-hierarchy.
If the location information in the query is ambiguous, and there is no additional information to rank the locations (such as user location or the relative importance of the location), the confidence is set to Medium. For example, a location query for "148th Ave, Bellevue" may return "148th Ave SE" and "148th Ave NE" both with Medium confidence.
If the location information in the query does not provide enough information to geocode a specific location, a less precise location value may be returned and the confidence is set to Medium. For example, if an address is provided, but a match is not found for the house number, the geocode result with a Roadblock entity type may be returned. You can check the entityType field value to determine what type of entity the geocode result represents. For a list of entity types, see Entity Types.