How Geometry Search works

The user passes the boundary of a physical site as input and receives the business locations operating inside it as output.

Geometry Search accepts a polygon or a bounding box representing a single site, and returns every Veridion location found within it. It exists for workflows where the site itself, rather than a street address, is how a location is identified.

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When the geometry is the better identifier
Some workflows start from a known physical site rather than a street address. The source data is keyed by a parcel, a building footprint, a site perimeter, a yard, or a facility boundary.
Requiring an address in those cases adds a translation step that loses information: the site has to be reduced to an address or a point, resolved, and then reconstructed. Large industrial and infrastructure sites make this worse, since they can span several acres, carry multiple entrances or addresses, use inconsistent street naming, or sit directly adjacent to other businesses.
Geometry Search removes that step. The boundary you already hold stays the identifier.

What it is for

Geometry Search answers one question: given a known property, parcel, building, yard, or facility boundary, which businesses are physically operating there?

It is built for site-level work: verifying occupancy at a specific place, and identifying every business active within it. Typical uses include:

Commercial real estate and property investment. Identify the businesses occupying a parcel or asset being sourced, underwritten, or monitored.
Property and catastrophe insurance. Verify which businesses operate within an insured property or facility boundary.
Lending and structured real estate finance. Identify the operating businesses associated with a collateral property.
Logistics and supply chain. Resolve operators at warehouses, terminals, container yards, equipment yards, ports, and large industrial facilities, where an address may not uniquely describe the site.
Utilities and infrastructure. Identify businesses operating within substations, energy facilities, industrial campuses, storage sites, and other bounded assets.
Government and land management. Associate cadastral parcels or other known sites with the businesses physically operating on them.

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Site level, not area level
Geometry Search is scoped to a single physical site: a parcel, a building, a yard, a campus, or a facility. It is not a way to search a neighbourhood, a city, or a region, and boundaries above a maximum area are rejected.
If you have an area and a set of business criteria rather than a specific site, use the Search API.

What it returns

A list of the Veridion locations found inside the boundary, each with a confidence score and an explanation of how it was matched.

Unlike the Location Resolver, which identifies a single business from an address, Geometry Search returns every business it finds. A parcel can carry more than one operating business, and where it does, all of them are returned rather than one being chosen.

The number of locations returned is the occupant count for that site, which is what tells you whether a business is the sole operator or one of several active on the same parcel.

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An empty result is an answer, not a failure
If nothing matches, the response is a normal success with an empty list. A boundary cannot fail to resolve the way an address can.
An empty result means no Veridion business location was found inside the boundary. It is not proof that a site is unoccupied.

Accepted input

The boundary can be supplied in either of two forms:

a polygon, as WKT POLYGON or MULTIPOLYGON;
a bounding box, as four numbers.

A polygon is more precise. A bounding box is a rectangle, so on an irregular or angled parcel it also covers ground outside the site, and can pick up businesses on neighbouring land.

Use a multipolygon where a single site is made up of disjoint parts, for example a parcel split by a road or an easement. The parts are treated as one boundary, and a business found in more than one of them is returned once.

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Coordinates must be WGS84, longitude before latitude
Parcel data from public sources is often published in a projected coordinate system such as State Plane or NAD83, and must be reprojected before it is submitted. A projected coordinate falls outside valid ranges and is rejected.
Axis order is the more dangerous of the two, because reversed coordinates are still valid and are not rejected. They simply describe somewhere else. If a boundary returns nothing unexpectedly, check the axis order first.

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How a location is matched to a boundary
For how the API decides which locations fall inside a boundary, what the confidence score means, and how to choose a threshold, see Matching methodology.

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Making the request
For the route, the request body, the query parameters, and the error responses, see Get locations in a geometry.