I'm working on a project that returns information based on the user's location. I also want to display the user's town in text (no map) so they can change it if it's not accurate.
If things go well I hope this will be more than a small experiment, so can anyone recommend a good reverse geocoding service with the least restrictions? I notice that Google/Yahoo have a limit to the number of daily queries along with other usage terms. I basically need to take latitude and longitude and convert them to a city/town (which I presume cannot be done using the HTML5 Geolocation API).
Geocoda just launched a geocoding and spatial database service and offers up to 1K queries a month free, with paid plans starting at $49 for 25,000 queries/month. SimpleGeo just closed their Context API so you may want to look at Geocoda or other alternatives.
You're correct, the browser geolocation API only provides coordinates.
I use SimpleGeo a lot and recommend them. They offer 10K queries a day free then 0.25USD per 1K calls after that. Their Context API is what you're going to want, it pretty much does what is says on the tin. Works server-side and client-side (without requiring you to draw a map, like Google.)
GeoNames can also do this and allows up to 30K "credits" a day, different queries expend different credit amounts. The free service has highly variable performance, the paid service is more consistent. I've used them in the past, but don't much anymore because of the difficulty of automatically dealing with their data, which is more "pure" but less meaningful to most people.
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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/
There are lots of existing questions relating to this issue, but I have looked at as many of them as I could find and did not get an answer.
I'm trying to perform an offline reverse geocoding lookup on iOS based on a latitude and longitude. I'd like to be able to provide a latitude and longitude, and be provided with the country in which that point lies. I can do this with Geonames (such as: http://api.geonames.org/countryCode?lat=45.03&lng=8.2&username=demo), but I need a similar ability offline, without Internet functionality on the device.
CLLocation does not provide offline services that work reliably enough for what I'm doing, it relies on caches made while you were previously online, etc. Messy.
I've tried this: https://github.com/drodriguez/reversegeocoding but haven't had any luck, it requires some slightly complex / confusing Terminal installations using something called Thor which I've never heard of, and was throwing up a variety of errors, so I bailed on it.
I've found a few downloadable maps, but these seem to be even more complicated, and worryingly, hundreds of megabytes or even gigabytes in size – much beyond the scope of an iOS app. I only need countries, nothing smaller than that (cities, streets, locations, etc.) so I think I should be able to get a much smaller file.
So my key question is: is there some pre-existing database or tool, preferably with iOS support, that I can feed a latitude/longitude, and get a country? And, if not, what steps should I take to get such functionality working on my own?
Thanks in advance.
ReverseGeocodeCountry is a simple lightweight offline country reverse geocoder for iOS, it has a static JSON file with country polygon data that is used to reverse geocode any lat/lng:
https://github.com/krisrak/ios-offline-reverse-geocode-country
The "Countries of the World" is a .csv text file with countries, coordinates, localised country names, capitals and other information. It seems to be free to use. You just have to import it into an SQLite database.
Edit Just noticed you want reverse geocoding. The database would only be good for forward geocoding.
You can download shapefiles for all countries at http://www.gadm.org/download. If you download a .kmz, you can unpack it to a list of coordinates for the borders. You could probably take every 5th or 10th coordinate to get smaller size (with less accuracy).
Just in case I can suggest another good written offline geocoding library.
https://github.com/Alterplay/APOfflineReverseGeocoding
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 plan to write a thesis about using sentiment information to enhance the predictivity of some financial trading model for currency.
The sentiment data should be twitter threads including some keyword, like "EUR.USD". And I will filter out some sentiment words to identify the sentiment. Simple idea. Then we try to see whether here is any relation between the degree of sentiment and the movement of EUR.USD.
My big concern is on twitter data. As we all know that the twitter set up the limit to see the history data. You could only browser back for like 5 days. It is not enough since our strategy based on daily sentiment.
I noticed that google have some fantastic thing like timeline about the twitter updates: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/googles_twitter_timeline_lets_you_explore_the_past.php
But first of all, I am in Switzerland and seems I have no such function on my google which is too smart to identify my location and may block some US google version function like this. Secondly, even I could see some fancy interactive google timeline control on my firefox, How could I dig out data from my query and save them? Does google supply such api?
The Google service you mentioned has shut down recently so you won't be able to use it. (http://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-realtime-shuts-down-as-twitter-deal-expires/31007/)
If you need a longer timespan of data to analyze I see the following options:
pay for historical data :) (https://dev.twitter.com/docs/twitter-data-providers)
if you don't want to pay, you need to fetch tweets containing EUR/USD whatever else (you could use the streaming API for this) and store them somehow. Run this service for a while (if possible) and you'll have more than just 5 days of data.