I am trying to build an iphone app that finds the location with business name.
For example, I want to annotate a restaurant and I want to find it with the name of restaurant. I was trying to use CLGeocoder, but it seems like geocoder does not help in this case. I am not sure what to do.. can anyone give me a hint about this?
Thank you
Google maps will take a business name and return location(s). It sounds like a webservice is what you're needing, you'll just have to think through the inputs, the outputs, and figure out how it all logically fits into your app.
"Business name" is info independent of the address and not available to CLGeocoder. For this you have to use an external service where business names are actually registered. I would suggest the Google Places API, but the search results will still be limited to those businesses registered to Google.
And yes, you will have to dirty your hands with "NSURL stuff", and process the results with "NSJSONSerialization stuff".
If you're happy to consider an SDK-based solution, Huq Industries offer exactly this as part of their Real-world Analytics platform. They've done a lot to address the problem of reliably relating device location to physical businesses accurately by combining location with other data including WiFi. You can get business events by business name, category and address.
Coverage is pretty global and it's mostly free. Check out the SDK repo on GitHub.
Disclaimer: I contributed to this.
Related
I have to make a restaurant home delivery website, and the owners do not wish to deliver more than 6km away. I hear that the geoIP DB 'Maxmind GeoLite city' is not particularly accurate though. Furthermore if you know of a database that has a shortcode, or predefined query for obtaining the distance without loads of coding, I would love to hear about it! I hope the question is well defined enough. All advice welcome!
I don't know the specification of your project, but it's likely you do know the delivery address. In this case you could use Google's Geocoding APIs to get the position (lat,lng) and then calculate the distance.
Of course there are limitations in the amount of daily requests, but I hardly think your app will reach that limit.
Take a look here:
https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/geocoding
As far as I know, there are no free IP geolocation databases that will reliably provide the accuracy you are looking for, especially if your client has visitors using mobile devices.
I would recommend that you take a look at W3C Geolocation JavaScript API. The results from this will often be more accurate than IP geolocation, especially if the user is on a device with GPS. Do note that it will pop up a dialog asking the user whether they want to share their location with your site.
HTML5 geo location if far more accurate than IP address based location.
http://ipgeo5.com/
I'm writing an iOS application and it would be very handy to know the way to find a nearest business name (and especially business type, such as restaurant/hotel/store etc.) by a GPS coordinate, or at least by an address.
So just curious, is there such API/Web service out there?
Yes
Bing
Google Places
Yahoo Geo Technologies
I'm sure there are loads more to be found with a quick google
OK, it seems like I have to answer my own question. I didn't try it out in code, but the answer is here:
http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/places/
Unfortunately there seems to be a cap on how many times Google places API can be called (for free), i.e. 1000 times per day (for the same API_key.)
I want to be able to run queries locally comparing latitude and longitude of locations so I can run queries for certain addresses I've captured based on distance.
I found a free database that has this information for zip codes but I want this information for more specific addresses. I've looked at google's geolocation service and it appears it's against the TOS to store these values in my database or to use them for anything other than doing stuff with google maps. (If somebody's looked deeper into this and I'm incorrect let me know)
Am I likely to find any (free or pay) service that will let me store these lat/lon values locally? The number of addresses I need is currently pretty small but if my site becomes popular it could expand quite a bit over time to a large number. I just need to get the coordinates of each address entered once though.
This question hasn't received enough attention...
You're correct -- it can't be done with Google's service and still conform to the TOS. Cheers to you for honestly seeking to comply with the TOS.
I work at a company called SmartyStreets where we process addresses and verify addresses -- and geocode them, too. Google's terms don't allow you to store the data returned from the API, and there's pretty strict usage limits before they throttle or cut off your access.
Screen scraping presents many challenges and problems which are both technical and ethical, and I don't suppose I'll get into them here. The Microsoft library linked to by Giorgio is for .NET only.
If you're still serious about doing this, we have a service called LiveAddress which is accessible from any platform or language. It's a RESTful API which can be called using GET or POST for example, and the output is JSON which is easy to parse in pretty much every common language/platform.
Our terms allow you to store the data you collect as long as you don't re-manufacture our product or build your own database in an attempt to duplicate ours (or something of the like). For what you've described, though, it shouldn't be a problem.
Let me know if you have further questions about address geocoding; I'll be happy to help.
By the way, there's some sample code at our GitHub repo: https://github.com/smartystreets/LiveAddressSamples
http://www.zip-info.com/cgi-local/zipsrch.exe?ll=ll&zip=13206&Go=Go could use a screen scraper if you just need to get them once.
Also Microsoft provides this service. Check if this can help you http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc966913.aspx
I am working on a mobile mapping application (currently iOS, eventually Android) - and I am struggling with how to best support reverse geocoding from lat/long to Country/State without using an online service.
Apple's reverse geocoding API depends on Google as the backend, and works great while connected. I could achieve similar functionality using the Open Street Maps project too, or any number of other web services.
What I really want however is to create a C library that I can call even when offline from within my application, passing in the GPS coordinates, and having it return the country and/or state at those coordinates. I do not need finer granularity than state-level, so the dataset is not huge.
I've seen examples of how to do this on a server, but never anything appropriate for a mobile device.
I've heard Spatialite might be a solution, but I am not sure how to get it working on iOS, and I wonder if it may be overkill for the problem.
What are some recommended techniques to accomplish this?
Radven
You will need to get the Shapefiles (lat/lng outline) of all the administrative entities (US states, countries, etc). There are a lot of public domain sources for these. For example, the NOAA has shapefiles for US states and territories you can download:
http://www.nws.noaa.gov/geodata/catalog/national/html/us_state.htm
Once you got the shapefiles, you can use a shapefile reader to test if a lat/lng is within a shape. There are open source readers in C, just google. I seen stuff at sourceforge for shapefiles, but have not used these myself.
The Team at OpenGeoCode.Org
If you're looking for an approach based on a quadtree, try Yggdrasil. It generates a quadtree based on country polygon data. A Ruby example script can be found here.
I can suggest good written offline geocoding 3rd party library.
https://github.com/Alterplay/APOfflineReverseGeocoding
Let's say I'm just wondering around with my cellphone and I want to know exactly which place of business I'm in. This would seem to be easy, but I don't see away to do it. It's possible to reverse geocode but this gives an address range. Google doesn't seem to have http base local search using local information, because you could kind of guess from the local search or points of interest. It needs to be through an http API, not an ajax driven map. Is there a way to do this?
You might look at GeoAPI, which lets you search for businesses near a particular lat/lon coordinate and returns detailed information about the business (name, type, hours, etc.). It's a simple JSON API with good documentation and examples.
There's likely more APIs out there for local business data -- which I personally would love to hear about if people want to add them as answers to this question or comments on my answer. What's your favorite? What are the advantages and disadvantages?