I've tried Google but I'm not smart enough to build my own Google Store locator. Everything is either old or in PHP and I use Python. Even GAE uses Python but I can't find any tutorials for Python at all. I even had a bounty here on S.o. for resources to a Python store locator and the only answer had a post from 2008 that was updated to "deprecated" on the post itself.
So I decided to give Bing a try and it has more noob options, such as "enter address here" and then it's listed in the app. The only problem is that everything is pointing me to Bing Spacial Datasend and it says they want to charge an arm and a leg.
Also, if you know of any, are there any good tutorials on building a Bing Store Locator? Google search has come up empty for me but they could always be hiding them. Thanks.
If you have less than 50 locations you can use the Bing Spatial Data Services under the free terms of use. If your application is a public facing web site, which most store locators are you can also generate 125,000 transactions against Bing Maps for free per year. If this is enough or not would depend on the number of stores and customers you have. The Bing Spatial Data Services is a really good option as you simply upload your data and it exposes it as a spatial rest service for you which you can access directly from JavaScript without the need for any server side code. Here is an example of how to query a data source in the Bing Spatial Data Services: http://www.bingmapsportal.com/ISDK/AjaxV7#SpatialDataServices1
If your application has a lot more volume then you would need a Bing Maps license. The cost of a license varies depending on the amount of transactions your application will use. If you have a Bing Maps license data sources can have up to 600,000 locations in a single data source and each Bing Maps account is allowed up to 25 data sources.
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I have a (commercial) machine learning project where I want to enrich the existing information with data from different API sources (like Google Places, Facebook Graph), save this in a database and analyse the whole data with machine learning algorithms (e.g. perform clustering).
But according to e.g. Google Places caching and storing data is not allowed:
3.2.4 (a) No Scraping. Customer will not extract, export, or otherwise scrape Google Maps Content for use outside the Services. For example, Customer will not: (i) pre-fetch, index, store, reshare, or rehost Google Maps Content outside the services; (ii) bulk download Google Maps tiles, Street View images, geocodes, directions, distance matrix results, roads information, places information, elevation values, and time zone details; (iii) copy and save business names, addresses, or user reviews; or (iv) use Google Maps Content with text-to-speech services. https://cloud.google.com/maps-platform/terms/#3-license
3.2.4 (b) No Caching. Customer will not cache Google Maps Content except as expressly permitted under the Maps Service Specific Terms
https://cloud.google.com/maps-platform/terms/#3-license
5.4 Caching. Customer can temporarily cache latitude (lat) and longitude (lng) values from the Places API for up to 30 consecutive calendar days, after which Customer must delete the cached latitude and longitude values. Customer can cache Places API Place ID (place_id) values, in accordance with the Places API Policies.
https://cloud.google.com/maps-platform/terms/maps-service-terms/
How did you proceed in similar projects? Is it really caching what I want to do in the project or is there a slight difference? I've made a request to Google but they couldn't answer this question on the telephone. And I need to store the data somewhere to be able to perform the machine learning algorithms.
How complex a project would this be?
There is the issue of integrating the dataset specific API.
I.e. dataset column names, dataset metadata perhaps
There is the issue of integration higher level APIs.
I.e names of datasets available, information about the specific portal, ...
Am I missing the point here with my question? Or would this a major coding project?
RLH
There are a couple of options you might take a look at:
You can actually create maps from Socrata data right from within our data exploration tools. Here's a support article on how you can do so
Using the GeoJSON output from our API, you can pull data into tools like CartoDB without needing to download it first
You could create a map mashup using a library like Leaflet or the Google Maps API. Here's an example of how to do it with the Google Maps API
I am creating a webpage that includes maps for my software engineering thesis. The page will include following features:
Show a specific location and save it to a database;
Showing different roads in the same map and save then to database;
Getting the nearest road that passes nearby a specific location pointed by a user - a little search function;
Users might be allowed to create different roads, which can be saved in a database.
The thing is that the service (API) used should be free. For this reason, we might not be using Google Maps.
We are using Java for the Model Classes.
Which maps API can I use?
How can I ask it which of the roads is nearest to a certain point (location) on the map?
Google Maps API is Free as long as you are not using more than a certain amount of traffic. If its for a class project it should be fine, but if that project turned into a commercial site, it would become expensive.
I'm currently developing a location based social network in Ruby on Rails. I also want to include a recommendation system. For testing the algorithms of this recommendations I need some real, anonymous training data. I've found the data from the Netflix Prize, but they are only including .
I'm searching for data that includes
users
friendships
locations or venues
check-ins (like in foursquare)
Does anybody know a good source for such data? Or a proven algorithm for generating this data? Or any other idea?
Search for random graph generation algorithms (more prciese, "social graph generation") to simulate social graph. Try retrieving the some test geolocation data by Google maps API or similar services. Unfortunately, I don't know what is "check-ins (like in foursquare)".
Also see Free Social Graph Data
I've finally solved it by using the gowalla API. Here you get a lot of information about users, without asking the users to permit the access to their data (kinda strange, but it works).
check it out: http://gowalla.com/api/explorer#/users/sco
I would like to include local business address/phone numbers into my site.
Does anyone have thoughts on using google local search api vs. twitter's geo api vs. purchasing a directory listing?
Mainly depends on your site and needs (real time, offline..).
Google local gives very good results, the best from my experience (compared to other apis).You should check the terms of service of each service. If I remember correctly, google doesn't allow using it's local api if you site charges users for money.
Also, I think google TOS limits you to client side usage, but you should read the TOS to see if it's true.
Haven't tried the twitter geo api too much, but I remember it didn't fit my needs.
Purchasing a directory listing is not cheap. Again, depends on your needs; do you need US business listings? World wide? If you want US businesses, the leading companies for purchasing a DB of listings are: localeze, infousa, acxiom.
Besides Google Local Search (which actually has been deprecated), there's now SimpleGeo Places, which is free for low volume use and without restrictive terms of service. I don't work for them.
Could also use the Google Places API (which has not been deprecated) using the instructions here.