Not getting much luck tracking this down through their official support channels.
Does MapBox have known data quality issues in certain geographies.
Take for example the following address in Hong Kong
12 Cloud View Road, Hong Kong
Google Maps has no problem finding this location by this address
Mapbox on the other hand, does not find it. See: https://docs.mapbox.com/search-playground/#
I've tried numerous things including specifying the Country/WorldView filtering options, but still no joy. And I can't find anything in the mapbox documentaiton that talks about coverage of various nations or address languages.
I need to make a decision on whether to go with Google Maps (significantly more expensive for our needs) vs. MapBox (doesn't seem to support what we require in certain territories).
Related
I want to know if there is any way to get a city/suburb/postal code's outer boundary coordinates, so as to be able to draw a polygon on the map.
I have read through the google maps API documentation (Places, Maps, and Routes) and I can't find anywhere where they provide this information.
Native in google maps if you search for a city google maps will draw a polygon around the city edges. Drawing the polygon is not the issue I just want to know how to get the polygon points for any given location.
I have searched and all the available answers are either very old or provided only a community maintained polygon database, that is not guaranteed to have your location mapped.
So my question is, do google maps APIs expose some function to get these coordinates, or is there some reputable well maintained service where this information can be obtained from?
I am using it in a flutter applicant making use of google_maps_flutter.
These are some of the resources and other links I found but seem dated.
Resource 1
Resource 2
Googles Docs
Please please help.
I'm not sure that the Google Maps API offers this functionality, but I trust that you've dug through enough of their documentation to find that they don't.
I suggest looking at Nominatim, which queries data from OSM (OpenStreetMap). They're free to use and community-driven - which can be both awesome and scary (eg. you can't assume "permanent ID"s for the things you query)
Relevant Links:
https://nominatim.org/release-docs/latest/api/Overview/
https://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/ui/search.html
Otherwise, you could also try looking for other tools that allow you to download datasets of boundary coordinates (eg: GADM) but you'd have to find one that has the level of granularity you need and read up on their usage policies (most disallow use for commercial purposes).
Unfortunately the world of GIS and digital cartography is one that can get pretty complicated and that I'm no expert in, but I hope this helps somewhat.
Listing other resources I've found that are rather outdated, but could still be helpful:
Google Maps how to Show city or an Area outline
Add "Search Area" outline onto google maps result
I'm using leaflet map in my ionic application.
On offline, by default, open street map layer loads but when changing the zoom level, the map disappears.
How can I get the map to show when zoomed offline?
You need to download (pre-cache) the tile images to work with offline mode.
Download the tiles at the zoom levels you want. Map data is quite large and so you may want to limit to a small subset of zoom levels, or a geographic boundary (a city, country, etc.)
OSM's specific tile usage policy is here: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tile_usage_policy But the part that applies to your app is this:
In particular, downloading significant areas of tiles at zoom levels
17 and higher for offline or later usage is forbidden without prior
consultation with a System Administrator.
That page also lists numerous "free" tile providers. Because I expect it to change "significantly" over time, I'm not gonna copy and paste it for you.
Unless you enter into some kind of contract/agreement with the tile provider, you may need to render your own or find a different tile service that will allow you to pre-cache tiles.
The details for downloading map data that can be rendered as tiles can be found on the OSM website: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Downloading_data
There are multiple ways to get the data from OSM, but these services and options will undoubtedly change over time so I think it safest to just refer to their website (google "download open street map data" if above link is broken).
I have used a .NET library called BruTile to manage the tile cache. But basically it is just a bunch of image files organized in a zoom/grid structure.
It would also be good for you to google search topics such as "ionic leaflet tile cache" and "pre cache map tiles ionic" and such. There isn't a lot out there yet, but this is a growing area of development.
Thoughts regarding mobile apps
If you are deploying to mobile devices it probably doesn't make sense to deploy the pre-cached tiles because (a) they will become out of date and require constant upkeep, and (b) large file size resulting in slow downloads. It would be better to download tiles while online after the app is installed.
Windows and Android phones both allow download of offline map data in their maps apps. It may be possible to leverage that data. Otherwise you would make your app work similarly: prompt user to download maps for their region, and then find a way to reasonably specify the region (geographic area) for which they need maps. It is also a good idea to let the user know how much data will be downloaded for metered data plans and device storage.
It also would be better for you to use a server other than the OSM servers, such as a paid Microsoft or MapQuest or Bing account. The OSM servers aren't capable of handling production load across every SPA that wants maps to work offline. Better to rely on the device's capabilities and built-in maps app if possible. Amazon and Azure (for example) services may be feasible for this. If you wrote your own program to run as a service on your own sever it could pre-cache tiles from the tile service (thus reducing your usage fees and server load) and then the apps would just get map data from your server. This also gives you the opportunity to get creative with your own custom tiles.
I am trying to help witth rescue operations in Nepal.
I have setup a Google Form here and that information gets stored on a Google Sheet.
Now, I want to provide a map (OSM) that would autopopulate using data in the Google Sheet (there is a column with GPS coordinates.
Is this currently do-able? It would be ideal if I could provide an endpoint where various OSM maps could get the Google Sheet information from.
Thanks in advance.
You can use Leaflet or OpenLayers to place markers and popups on top of OSM maps. uMap might also be worth looking at.
Additionally there is also the Humanitarian OSM Team (HOT) doing various tasks for helping the Nepal rescue teams. The 2015 Nepal earthquake wiki contains an overview, guidelines and specific tasks. It might be useful to discuss your ideas with HOT.
In short, no. I've been in communication with Google about this. It's currently not a feature, and they have no plans to add this feature in the future.
And I, for one, desperately need such a feature! I'd imagine if thousands of us flooded Google with requests for this feature -- maybe they'd add it?
The service or library that cleans the address needs to be callable from a custom .NET wrapper service or library. There is no UI requirement to display a map, or track delivery of a physical package to a postal address.
https://www.usps.com/business/webtools.htm is out as an option because the terms of use are restricted to applications supporting the physical delivery of packages.
It seems that both google and Bing have terms of use that restrict application development usage to presentation of maps in a UI.
Here's an example of using google JavaScript library for geocoding address lookups. It seems to work well. Unfortunately I can’t use this, but looking for something that works nearly as well.
http://jsfiddle.net/Robotronic/ayfgT/
I have been looking for the same thing lately, and have a couple of possibilities. Since I don't have my home computer at work, the only one I can remember now is SmartyStreets.com. They give you a small number for free, then you have to pay after that. I have one more, which I can get a little later tonight.
It may be out of your price range, but my company has used Melissa Data for quite a while and the only failures were on super-new housing developments. I think they also send us periodic database updates.
We need to display meta information (e.g, address, name) on our site for various venues like bars, restaurants, and theaters.
Ideally, users would type in the name of a venue, along with zip code, and we present the closest matches.
Which APIs have people used for similar geolocation purposes? What are the pros and cons of each?
Our basic research yielded a few options (listed in title and below). We're curious to hear how others have deployed these APIs and which ones are ultimately in use.
Fwix API: http://developers.fwix.com/
Zumigo
Does Facebook plan on offering a Places API eventually that could accomplish this?
Thanks!
Facebook Places is based on Factual. You can use Factual's API which is pretty good (and still free, I think?)
http://www.factual.com/topic/local
You can also use unauthenticated Foursquare as a straight places database. The data is of uneven quality since it's crowdsourced, but I find it generally good. It's free to a certain API limit, but I think the paid tier is negotiated.
https://developer.foursquare.com/
I briefly looked at Google Places but didn't like it because of all the restrictions on how you have to display results (Google wants their ad revenue).
It's been a long time since this question was asked but a quick update on answers for other people.
This post, right now at least, will not go into great detail about each service but merely lists them:
http://wiki.developer.factual.com/w/page/12298852/start
http://developer.yp.com
http://www.yelp.com/developers/documentation
https://developer.foursquare.com/
http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/places/
http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/api/
https://simplegeo.com/docs/api-endpoints/simplegeo-context
http://www.citygridmedia.com/developer/
http://fwix.com/developer_tools
http://localeze.com/
They each have their pros and cons (i.e. Google Places only allows 20 results per query, Foursquare and Facebook Places have semi-unreliable results) which can be explained a bit more in detail, although not entirely, in the following link. http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-pros-and-cons-of-each-Places-API
For my own project I ended up deciding to go with Factual's API since there are no restrictions on what you do with the data (one of the only ToS' that I've read in its entirety). Factual has a pretty reliable API, which as a user of the API you may update, modify, or flag rows of the data. Facebook Places bases their data on Factual's, just another fact to shed some perspective.
Hope I can be of help to any future searchers.
This is not a complete answer, because I havn't compared the given geolocation API, but there is also the Google Places API, which solves a similiar problem like the other APIs.
One thing about SimpleGeo: The Location API of SimpleGeo supports mainly US (and Canada?) based locations. The last time I checked, my home country Germany doesn't has many known locations.
Comparison between places data APIs is tough to keep up to date, with the fast past of the space, and with acquisitions like SimpleGeo and HyperPublic changing the landscape quickly.
So I'll just throw in CityGrids perspective as of February 2012. CityGrid provides 18M US places, allowing up to 10M requests per month for developers (publishers) at no charge.
You can search using a wide range of "what" and "where" (Cities, Neighborhoods, Zip Codes, Metro Areas, Addresses, Intersections) searches including latlong. We have rich data for each place including images, videos, reviews, offers, etc.
CityGrid also has a developer revenue sharing program where we'll pay you to display some places as well as large mobile and web advertising network.
You can also query Places via the CityGrid API using Factual, Foursquare and other places providers places and venue IDs. We aggregate data from several places data providers through our system.
Website: http://developer.citygridmedia.com/