International Geocoding from Postal Code - geocode

I'm trying to develop an addressing solution where a user can input a postal code and the City, State, and Country are automatically filled in. This is obviously straightfoward for a given locale/culture setting depending on the service, but I'm trying to manage this for international lookups. For example, the postal code 10104 maps to (at the very least), New York City USA, San Jose Costa Rica, and a region in France. I need to be able to throw the postal code at a service and return all matches which I can provide to the user to select from. As far as I can tell, this is not easily manageable from the 3 major geocode services (Google, Bing, Yahoo), but I'm hoping I'm missing something. Any help in getting this moving would be much appreciated.

Related

Extracting Specific Country from Continent Wide MapTiles

Apologies for noob question, but I am no coder and total noob with MapTiles. I have a software that uses .mbtiles for a TileServer. I want to get a map of Algeria, but the price for the whole Continent is not much more than the country itself, so figured I'd buy whole Africa tiles, in case I need more countries in future.
If I purchase the Africa's OpenMapTiles (.mbtiles) would I be able to extract a specific country of it? If so, how can I go about it?
Thanks a lot for your help!
I know you can specify specific countries when hosting tiles and like you saw when purchasing. I would believe this is also possible.

OCR for business card reader in iPhone app

I was incorporating the OCR in my iPhone app using open source library "tesseract".I have seen some apps on AppStore doing so. I am just wondering how can I segregate the data that it reads from the card, i.e, how will I distinguish between say FirstName and the LastName or between CompanyName and the person's name, how will I distinguish whether the number is Phone# or the Fax# etc.
I wish that there are some standard formats of the Business Cards but I feel that would be hard luck to assume so.Any inkling on that would help a lot.
I posted it over here to gather the thoughts of various developers so that I can come up with some good logic (to make it more accurate) to classify the data that we get from the OCR engine.
Create some guesses how the various text pieces could be interpreted and let the user pick the best one. The format should be pretty standard per country (e.g. in English/German/French etc., the first name is 99.9% in front of the last name)
If now guess is good enough, the user can assign the fields himself
For the firstname/lastname problem, you could maybe consult a local file or web service with common pre-parsed names in the user's country
In order to distinguish the First Name, Last Name, Company Name, Fax or a Phone number use "Regular Expressions".
Example:
Phone - "^(\s*\d\s*){12}$"
Email - "^\w+#[a-zA-Z_]+?.[a-zA-Z]{2,3}$"
In the same way, you can find the regular expressions for other Labels in the below link.
https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/write-regular-expressions/
Thank You.

Showing nearby specific business offices in table view cells using iphone GPS

There are lots of similar questions but my question is different in that sense i got coordinates of my current location in my application.
But now i want to show specific business offices in table view around that coordinates. I know ReverseGeoConding is answer to that but i cant find suitable tutorial or advice on this. How can i implement it.
Please suggest .
Reverse Geocoding will provide you with address information for the coordinates provided. In order to get businesses around those coordinates, you may want to look into external APIs. I believe Facebook has a Places API and Foursquare has an API as well. These may be able to provide you with local business information.

How to find Location using Zipcode?

I am new iphone developer,please help to me.how can i find particular shops list in particular Zip Code.. that means i need to place pins in Some shops by searching Zipcode
Thanks in advance
I'm not sure there's a definitive "Right Way" to do what you're asking, but if it were me...
I would probably use Google's Places API to get a list of so-called Places (I gather this includes a fairly comprehensive list of businesses, as well as other points of interest) near the user. The API requires lat/long coordinates to resolve the list, you could either get that data from the user's iOS device (I don't develop for this platform so I can't give specifics) using Apple's location API, or if you really want to do a lookup by zipcode you might want to look at Google's Geocoding API. Keep in mind that Google's services are by no means the only game in town, and there are certainly other ways to do what you ask. But if it was me, this seems like the simplest solution

Less is more - auto ZIP code?

You have an international website with a form where people fill in their address.
Wouldn't it be great if people need to fill out one field less? Example:
100 visitors use the form each day
They spend 5 seconds on the ZIP code field
So 5 * 100 * 365 = 182500 seconds or 50 hours a year. And that's just for one form on one website. Multiply that by all websites that ask such information and you can see the time we can save by redesigning this.
You can get someone's ZIP code via geolocation + geocoding. But since a person's current position can easily differ from the city a person lives in, this isn't really usable.
A solution would be to get the ZIP code based on a geolocated (but changeable) country, input city and input street.
The API we could use: http://code.google.com/intl/nl/apis/maps/documentation/geocoding/ or http://developer.yahoo.com/geo/placefinder/.
Now the real question is, which problems would arise (internationalization, localization, accuracy, etc.)?
No-one else has answered this, so I'll have a go.
No, it wouldn't be great if the website filled in the zip code field based on other information. It might work for some people. It would certainly fail for enough people that you'd have to offer a zip code field as an override. Now you have a site with a higher complexity and development cost than one with a conventional zip code field, because you have to test both the automatic zip code guesser and the conventional field.
You'll have a usability hit which comes from people being confused by the two alternatives and not knowing which to choose.
You'll pay an opportunity cost, by spending design and development resources on the zip code guesser, instead of on some other feature which yields a larger usability benefit.
Here are some problems I foresee arising:
Inaccuracy: whatever mechanism you use collects correct hints (IP address location, street address and city) but generates the wrong zip code, due to errors
Remote use: Users entering a different address than their current location, e.g. using a computer at a hotel in a different country to fill out a form related to their home address, so location of IP address of computer is different from location of address in form
Localisation failure: whatever mechanism you use doesn't work with the hints of the user's address, e.g. different address conventions in a foreign country
Provider business terms: you want to use a geocoding service like Google's or Yahoo's APIs, but the license agreement for that service isn't compatible with the business model of your site. For example, they want you to pay if you are geocoding for commercial purposes, or for a site behind a firewall, or more than a certain number of transactions a day
Change in provider situation: you use an external geocoding service, and it goes out of business
etc.
Before taking on a feature like this, I'd take two steps:
User research. Can you identify users for whom the time taken to enter a zip code is a pain point? What about the one of the top three pain points? I'll bet this issue isn't even on your users radar.
Test on existing data. For whatever method you are thinking about using to guess zip code, try it on existing customer data, and see if you can accurately reproduce the zip code the customer entered. This will give you an idea of your error rate. Can you live with this error rate?
If your real question is, could someone please validate my feeling that this is a charming feature, then I probably haven't given you the answer you seek. But you asked, "what problems would arise?"