Would there be a way to do a city/state/country code lookup based on zip/country input by the user? My site will be international, hence the reason for asking the user to input their country.
I'm thinking the user inputs the zip/post-code and country, which gets saved to the database and then the Google geocode API will convert this to city, state and country and print the output to their user profile. For example:
User input:
Zip - 92646
Country - USA
Output:
Huntington Beach, CA, USA
I could just let the users input their city, state and country, but in the future I want to do some geocoding. So it makes sense to set it up now rather than migrate the database at a later stage. Or do you think I'm doing the wrong thing here? I have a site built in Rails. Thanks in advance.
** Comment: Looks like the demonstration on the RubyCoder Gem allows you to input the zip and country to print the City/State/Country/Zip, which is exactly what I'm after. Thoughts on Geocoder versus Google goecoder API?
I would advise to use the geocoder gem and allow the user to enter their address on one field. It is easier for the user to enter only one field in it a convenient format. And keep it string as a full address. Then give this address to geocoder (in general geocoder will do it automatically), and from there take the coordinates, city, state, etc.
If the user enters a bad address, he simply clarify it. This is just my opinion, not the rule.
Related
I have a .csv file with Twitter profiles including information such as username, name, description etc. One column is geolocation. In this text the user may have a country (i.e., UK), a city or town (i.e., Cambridge), an actual address (5 Tyrian Place, WR5 TY1), a state (i.e, California, CA) or something silly (i.e., West of Hell).
Is there an API/library/automatic way of taking this information and deriving the country? For example, if the location is Cambridge the output should be UK, if the address is in the UK, the output should be UK, etc.
Google has a reverse geocoding service which you can access through their Maps API:
https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/geocoding/start
They let you make 2500 free requests per day. One nice feature is it will give you correct latitude, longitude, state, country, etc for things like "Golden Gate Bridge" and "The Big Apple." Twitter users enter all sorts of (sarcastic) phrases for their location -- like "West of Hell," "Mars," etc -- and Google will reverse geocode that as well. Though, that may not be very useful.
As another level of checking, you can compare the user's timezone ("utc_offset"), if it is present, to the place that Google returns. It's a bit involved and requires that you compare the timezone's latitude boundaries to the latitude and longitude in Google's response.
I am saving photos with city names to server in my application. Firstly, I am getting city names with MapKit, by using latitude and longitude, and then saving photo and city name to database. Later when user want to search a photo, he/she writes the city name and I use autocomplete with Facebook Places (Graph API).
The problem is Facebook Places and MapKit might have different names (spelling). Even they are both in English. I am wondering how to query from my own server which have MapKit cities in it, with Facebook Places cities.
I assume it a is little bit more complicated as it seems first time. Until Facebook, Apple are not using the same data source for their city names it will be hard to find the cities where the name is not exactly the same if you are using the "raw" string, that you get from the FB places.
Maybe there is a much easier way to achieve it, but my first attempts would cover these options:
Save the geo points when you upload the photo, then find a library, API etc.. that returns you a latitude longtitude data based on the Facebook city name and then use this to query the closest result in your database (based on photo location)
2.
Suppose the user typed in a city name and you have a string value (call it rawCity) with the desired city name. Now rawCity should be contained in or be equal to the string that represents the city's Mapkit name.
Let's assign rawCity to a new string called searchStringCity and remove white spaces from it and make the whole string lowercase (non-ascii chars can make some trouble too).
Now you have two strings that should be added to a dictionary: /Pseudo code/
rawCity = Sample City Name
searchStringCity = yoursamplecity
fbCityDictionary = {rawName:rawCity, searchString:searchStringCity}
After you have the fbCityDictionary you're ready with the Facebook part.
As a second step you need some database related work, so next I would create a searchString column in my database and fill it with the "standarized"(remove whitespaces,uppercases,charachter coding stuff) name of the Mapkit type city name.
Now you can write a query where a db item's searchString value is equal to fbCityDictionary[searchString]. However it won't perfectly solve your problem, it will work when a whitespace or a lower/uppercase letter was the problem, but there are a lot of city names that doesn't has an english version and they can be much different in different map databases.
So you will be good for example cases like these:
Facebook version:
Sample City Name ---> samplecityname
Mapkit version:
Samplecity Name ---> samplecityname
These solutions can improve the results, but I would be curious to hear a better solution.
I want to create an "Add Address" view, a very basic "Street, City, Zip, Country" type of page: multiple text fields inside a table view. This is simple if you only ever added U.S addresses, but I'm not sure about how to do this the right way though, handling all international use-cases as well. Essentially:
1. How do you pick the right field label for each country? For e.g. for US / Australian addresses, the field should be called "State"; for UK, it's called "County", in some places it's called "Province". How do you know what the label should say (short of hard-coding logic myself for each country)?
2. How do you validate the values for those field? UK postal codes have a certain format, whereas in the US it's a 5-digit ZIP code. Also, in the US, there is a list of states that the user can select. How do you get that list?
I've looked into NSLocale, and can't find any way to do this. Surely there must be a good and easy way to do this?
I dug around and in the end the best thing I found was a guide on "The good international address field form", but it'll still be hard to validate it. I don't think it's done.
http://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2008/06/international-address-fields-in-web-forms.php
One method could be to reverse lookup the address through mapkit.
You can try to simplify the UI by adding just one text field and ask user to enter his address in an arbitrary way, and then use CLGeocoder class to convert the string to instance of CLPlacemark, which is a convenient container for such information as country, postal code, etc.
Our users can enter their location into a free-form text field, like "Austin TX", or even "The Motor City". How can I take this information and turn it into a canonical name? For example, "The Motor City" would be Detroit, MI. They might even enter a zipcode or an address.
I'm planning on storing the place name, or the lat/long, or the unique id code for their location in the database. Then I can determine proximity. Is there a geo lookup api I can use for this?
Yahoo has a nice open API for dealing with this kind of thing, WOEID's (Where on earth); query the WOE DB for your freeform string, it'll give you back a WOEID, then Query the WOEID for whatever actual data you want to store.
http://developer.yahoo.com/geo/geoplanet/guide/concepts.html
I'm looking for advice on parsing input from a user in multiple combinations of City / State / Zip Code / Country.
A common example would be what Google maps does.
Some examples of input would be:
"City, State, Country"
"City, Country"
"City, Zip Code, Country"
"City, State, Zip Code"
"Zip Code"
What would be an efficient and correct way to parse this input from a user?
If you are aware of any example implementations please share :)
The first step would be to break up the text into individual tokens using spaces or commas as the delimiting characters. For scalability, you can then hand each token to a thread or server (if using a Map-Reducer like architecture) to figure out what each token is. For instance,
If we have numbers in the pattern, then it's probably a zip code.
Is the item in the list of known states?
Countries are also fairly easy to handle like states, there's a limited number.
What order are the tokens in compared to the common ways of writing an address? Most input will probably follow the local post office custom for address formats.
Once you have the individual token results, you can glue the parts back together to get a full address. In the cases where there are questions, you can prompt the user what they really meant (like Google maps) and add that information to a learned list.
The easiest method to add that support to an applications, assuming you're not trying to build a map system, is to query Google or Yahoo and ask them to parse the date for you.
I am myself very fascinated with how Google handles that. I do not remember seeing anything similar anywhere else.
I believe, you try to separate an input string in words trying various delimeters - space, comma, semicolon etc. Then you have several combinations. For each combination, you take each words and match it against country, city, town, postal code database. Then you define some metric on how to evaluate the group match result for each combination. Here should also be cross rules, like if the postal code does not match well, but country, city, town match well and in combination refer to a valid address then the metric yields a high mark.
It is sure difficult and not an evening code exercise. It also requires strong computational resources - a shared hosting would probably crack under just 10 requests, but a data center could serve it well.
Not sure if there is an example implementation. Many geographical services are offered on paid basis. Something that sophisticated as GoogleMaps would likely cost a fortune.
Correct me if I'm wrong.
I found a simple PHP implementation
http://www.eotz.com/2008/07/parsing-location-string-php/
Yahoo seems to have a webservice that offers the functionality (sort of)
http://developer.yahoo.com/geo/placemaker/
Openstreetmap seems to offer the same search functionality on its homepage
http://www.openstreetmap.org/
Assuming you're only dealing with those four fields (City Zip State Country), there are finite values for all fields except for City, and even that I guess if you have a big city list is also finite. So just split each field by comma then check against each field list.
Assuming we're talking US addresses-
Zip is most obvious, so check for
that first.
State has 50x2 options
(California or CA), check that next
Country has ~190x2 options, depending
on how encompassing you want to be
(US, United States, USA).
Whatever is left over is probably your City.
As far as efficiency goes, it might make sense to check a handful of 'standard' formats first, like Dan suggests.