I am building a geolocation web application and I am really in the blur how I am going the handle the geolocation.
Briefly my app lets you create adverts on a specific city. The idea is to avoid the basic form with the city name, zipcode, country and just have an autocomplete field based on the city name.
I have a few idea how to handle that but I am not sure which one is the best.
There first one is to get a world cities database from maxmind (3M cities) and select from my database.
The other one is to use YQL and the geo API from yahoo...
I really don't know what is the best practice for this kind of app...
Greg
I have done some geolocation using the geokit plugin and gem. It works well with multiple geolocation providers (google and yahoo).
https://github.com/andre/geokit-gem
Related
I've been searching for a few months now on to find a solution on how to create my data structure (using PostgreSQL) to be able to filter my records (a table of events) by geolocation.
I'm trying to create a global database of dance events and I'd like to filter these events by different levels of geolocation (city, state/province/region, country, continent) as you would be able to on Airbnb or any other Airbnb alternative.
I'm currently using the Geocoder Ruby gem.
I don't need a map view currently as I'm still building my MVP.
Yesterday I stumbled across a site of house and petsitters that you can hire and they are filtering this list of sitters by the GooglePlaces Autocomplete on different levels of geolocation.
How can I achieve this? Have any of you come across something similar to this anywhere where I can see the code?
I'm willing to use whatever tech stack that will allow me to achieve this functionality!
Thanks in advance!
Here's a screen recording of me explaining what I'm trying to achieve!
Pet Sitters Website
I'm working with rails, geocoder and gmap4rails. Trying to figure out how to show boundaries of an ward district area in UK. Found mapit - Mapit by mySociaty . Would be amazing if anyone could suggest or point me in the direction for creating a similar functions in rails. I'm especially interested in functions like 'Touching this area' as showed in the mapit.mysociety.org site.
Google maps also show boundaries of an area e.g. google map example Shows boundaries for 'Roath' area. is there anyway retrieve that data from google ?
I also tested a lot of addresses with geocoder, looking up in google. Tried to Geocode from address administrative_area_level_1 2 and 3 as well as in locality or sublocality.
The results were very unreliable. Tried at least 20 addresses from birmigham city - only some of them returned administrative_area_level1,2,3 or locality or sublocality and most of the time it was wrong data.
Another website that is sort of showing ward areas with in a city is www.streetlife.com I think it only works for UK users. basically it takes a postcode from a user and then in their map they show users district and other district around it, which is pretty cool :) Does anyone know how it works ? or how to get something like that working in rails ?
I would really love to discuss this topic in more depth and figure out the best answers for it.
This question at gis.stackexchange is probably of use to you if you wish to use rails. The "touching" feature is fundamentally a PostGIS query, so you could build on top of anything that allowed you to make SQL queries to a PostgreSQL database - GeoDjango (on which MapIt is built) makes this nice, but you could certainly accomplish the same in rails with work.
You won't be able to get those boundaries you see out of Google Maps, I believe, as it's proprietary.
Geocoding is a separate topic - you may want to look at things like OpenStreetMap's Nominatim (MapQuest have a version) or GeoNames, which could supply a dataset you could use with geocoder - Ordnance Survey also publish GB datasets that could be of use.
I'm starting a new rails project that integrates closely with Google Maps. When a user searches for a city, I'm trying to decide whether to geocode the address on the fly (using Google's Geocoding API) or to look up the city in a database pre-populated with lat/long. After I have the lat/long I will plot it on Google Maps.
Which do you think would perform better? With the database lookup, the table would have to be pretty large to account for all the cities I would need and I would have to fallback on the geocoding API anyway for any cities that I don't have in my database.
I wasn't sure if there is a common practice to this or not. I don't need a user's specific location, but just a city they are searching for.
The size of the table is no problem, as long as you index on the city name.
Performance of indexed database queries outspeed web API access by far.
An other point is, that you have better controll of the found data. For example, if you find more than one matching city, you can provide a choice of your DB entries, while Google sometimes reports none or some random (or at least unexpected) search result.
This is, why I had to change to a DB search first strategy in one of my project: Google somtimes didn't find my customers addresses but something total different (i.e. small villages with the same name as the expected bigger one)
Why not do both?
Have the address's geocoded information in your database as "Address Cache" and then call the Google Maps Geocode API only if the address doesn't already exist in your database. That's the approach I used in my Google Maps to SugarCRM integration. It works well. BTW, the Google Maps Geocode API is impressively fast, so users rarely notice. Yet, there is a 2,500/day limit on request and it's also throttled to about 10 requests per second. So, considering those limits, I think a combination database/geocode approach is much better in the long run.
https://github.com/jjwdesign/JJWDesign-Google-Maps
The app I'm building needs to be able to match up users to events based on the city/town they're in. I'm still relatively new to Rails and completely new to Geolocation and using locations in an app. I'd figured on a design where users have one or many cities, and events would have one city which I'd hoped to extract without specifically asking the user for it, by getting it from the event address entered.
Mostly to provide some outside checking to help get the address entered correctly and consistently, but also to show a map, I installed this jquery address picker (https://github.com/sgruhier/jquery-addresspicker). Unfortunately the data returned by Google doesn't include a city but a "locality" or an "administrative area" that doesn't correlate reliably to city names. The localities being returned are more like what we in my home town would call "suburbs". What I need to procure is a city so I can allow users to search all events in their city rather than just the ones in their suburb.
Can anyone offer advice on how I could go about doing this? Many thanks.
Edit: Should maybe add that I'm wanting to do geocoding client-side so I don't run into problems with Google Maps limits or have to pay for geocoding etc.
There are some gems that provide you with that and may others geo related features, like calculating distances.
Here are the 2 most famous: https://github.com/alexreisner/geocoder and https://github.com/imajes/geokit
In the future I highly recommend you to head to https://www.ruby-toolbox.com/ to see what is available as a gem already and see what is the most popular at the moment.
For raw address info, use Google Maps API Reverse Geocoding which accepts lat/lon inputs and returns street address components. Modern browsers support location awareness (geolocation), with user permission, and will give you a lat/lon that "tends to be close" to where the browser is. That will probably get you a correct city/town in most cases.
The maps API is part of Google's broad suite of API tools -- there are gems that handle any Google API (well, most of them), or check out Google Maps for Rails, which will at the very least give you a good head start on how to use the API.
But if you're looking to validate postal code, this method will come up short, since the location awareness will vary in accuracy depending on browser, device (more accurate for mobile), the connection, population density, network coverage, and so on. Also, calling the
If you can get GPS-accurate lat/lon then it will be much more accurate ... except in some cases like in large cities, a single building will have its own postal code, so a few feet one way or the other might matter.
How do I go about displaying content based on a users location ? For ex. If somebody accesses the site from the New York , I would like to display New York Hotels . However if somebody accesses the site from Chicago , I would like to display Chicago hotels.
You're looking for a Geoloction database which would give you access to the typical IP ranges for the countries/cities you need to flag.
This is not absolute or completely trustworthy information though. Country level geo-location is mostly effective but anything like city/state/zip code level information should be treated with great caution.
I've worked with major multinational media providers using expensive paid services and discovered that the information in these databases is a very long way from correct and that users individual circumstances often prevent geo-location from being effective.
e.g. Virgin and East Coast trains in the UK use T-Mobile Germany as their onboard internet provider so you appear to be in Germany to many sites and payment processors.
There are quite a few free geolocation databases, MaxMind springs to mind (though this is not a recommendation of their service).
You can find some thoughts on implementing geo-location here
You need some database/api with information about hotells in different locations, then you need to now where the visitor is.
You can use something like Travel/Hotel API's? to find hotells.
And for finding the location of your visitor you can use something like http://www.hostip.info/use.html
or you can use HTML5 geolocation api example http://html5demos.com/geo . The bad thing with the html5 geo api is that the user need to accept before you get their location.
Remember that there is no guaranty that the location is correct...
This is the exact reason I created wpgeocode. WPGeocode is a free plugin for wordpress that enables publishers to customize content based on reader location. Check out the plugin at the support site at http://www.wpgeocode.com
The plugin enables shortcodes that can be placed in your posts or pages. There are many conditional shortcodes such as [wpgc_is_country_code country_code="US"] for this exact purpose. Simple open the shortcode, specify the target country_code and provide the content to be displayed if the reader is visiting from that specific country.
Visit http://www.wpgeocode.com/shortcodes for a complete listing - here are a few:
[wpgc_is_city_and_state city=”Yardley” state_code=”PA”]
[wpgc_is_ip” ip=”xx.xx.xx.xx”]
[wpgc_is_ips” ip=”xx.xx.xx.xx,aa.bb.cc.dd”]
[wpgc_is_not_ip” ip=”xx.xx.xx.xx”]
[wpgc_is_not_ips” ip=”xx.xx.xx.xx,aa.bb.cc.dd”]
[wpgc_is_city” city=””]
[wpgc_is_cities” cities=”city one,city two,city three”]
[wpgc_is_not_city” city=””]
[wpgc_is_not_cities” cities=”city
one,city two,city three”]
[wpgc_is_nearby”] – Uses the value you
specify in the Nearby Range setting from the administrative panel
[wpgc_is_not_nearby”]
[wpgc_is_within” miles=”10″]
[wpgc_is_within
kilometers=”12″]
[wpgc_is_country_name” country_name=””]
[wpgc_is_country_names” country_name=”United States,Egypt,Albania”]
[wpgc_is_country_code” country_code=””]
[wpgc_is_country_codes”
country_codes=”US,GB,AZ”]
[wpgc_is_state_code” state_code=””]
[wpgc_is_state_codes” state_codes=”PA,NJ,TX”]
[wpgc_is_not_country_name” country_name=””]
[wpgc_is_not_country_names” country_names=”United
States,Egypt,Albania”]
[wpgc_is_not_country_code” country_code=””]
[wpgc_is_not_country_codes” country_codes=”US,GB,AZ”]
[wpgc_is_not_state_code” state_code=””]
[wpgc_is_not_state_codes”
state_codes=”PA,NJ,TX”]
dotCMS offers the ability to geolocate content OTB (disclaimer, I work for them). You can see a demonstration that displays news content based on the user's location onthe demo site:
It is pretty easy to setup and use. Any type of content can be geolocated and the content can be accessed through the RESTful API. Under the covers, the Geolocation queries are handled natively via Elasticsearch.
Example:
http://demo.dotcms.com/demos/content-geolocation
Docs:
http://dotcms.com/docs/latest/es-geolocation-queries