Hi,
Does anybody knows where I can found a database with all basic geographical information ? e.g. list of all countries in the world, with its main sttes, location, cities and neighborhood will be great.
Thanks in advance for any feedback
regards
Agunet74
Really not sure what you’re actually trying to do but does the google api not give enough.
The docs that got me started(Here)](http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/geocoding/index.html) in converting an address to long/lat. The output seems to contain a fair bit of the required info. From wiki as my geography sucks
“Mountain View is a city in Santa Clara County”, and we have the State as California, I presume San Jose is still more local as we have 3 administrative_area. All contained in the returned output.
My tuppence any way.
I’m trying to make a database to all main cities (all their countries, etc) included, so the user oncly have to choose ig, and no write it.
Thanks for the advice.
wikimapia maybe?
I suspect what you want is to be able to enter an address and have it autotrack to the correct geographic location without the need to post - refine - refine - refine ? which is common among current mapping cr** like google maps. Or am I off track.
To further expand this from techwiz03 comment. I think this may depend on the framework unless I’m mistaken and without trying for example using django.
Django | Geolocation with GeoIP | Django documentation so once you have the GeoIP module then it would be a case of getting the requesters IP i.e HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR in django.
@techwiz03 am I barking up the right tree?
Geolocational data has two aspects and lots of copyright / intellectual property stuff involved AFASIT. At the core is the global positioning satellites which receive and send positional data and one of 16 forms of graphical representation depending on which satellite you are granted access to. Down on the ground, mapping services license for resale vectored graphics that assemble all these numbers into a general map database. The database is acquired by Google for example who pays royalty for the info and attaches the data to their own rendering system which has actual addresses, cities, regions, and countries.
The django you refer to is just one aspect of this whole big database where you are trying to use an ip assignment to position itself to an exact point to return the center and zoom ratio to be returned.
As I said, there are two aspects to this whole thing. I have explained how satellite based GPS data can filter down to provide the end user with info and maps (although my explanations are rather poor). It has the drawback of costs to obtain the info, copyright, intellectual and royalty complications if you intend to reuse the info or even store it, and the storage space needed to build the database (not to mention the time to track to a specific spot). The other aspect is verifying an address that you are not located at. In this second aspect you are looking for a destination. Yes you can send a request for a general area and then use zoom-in zoom-out and pan to zero in on the address but this takes often too much time.
Back in 1995, before I had Internet here, I was faced with a delivery service who needed to quickly direct drivers to addresses, and needed to gain immediate notification of wrong or bad addresses so they could be corrected at the call center. There was hardly any time to process 1000+ addresses a day so here was my solution.
In 2000, I improved the map quality, expanded the system to be able to create maps and address look-up for any city and put it out as SMART-MAP(North America). It died with no interest in it as people were fine with in car GPS and Internet GPS.
I used one small section of one map a short time ago to show on a business website to indicate to local customers where the business is. I immediately heard from the business that my map must be removed as it infringes upon copyright of some business I have never heard of. So long story short watch yourself! Even original work done by you is grounds for legal action if it too closely resembles copyrighted work.
Geolocational data has two aspects and lots of copyright / intellectual property stuff involved AFASIT. At the core is the global positioning satellites which receive and send positional data and one of 16 forms of graphical representation depending on which satellite you are granted access to. Down on the ground, mapping services license for resale vectored graphics that assemble all these numbers into a general map database. The database is acquired by Google for example who pays royalty for the info and attaches the data to their own rendering system which has actual addresses, cities, regions, and countries.
The django you refer to is just one aspect of this whole big database where you are trying to use an ip assignment to position itself to an exact point to return the center and zoom ratio to be returned.
As I said, there are two aspects to this whole thing. I have explained how satellite based GPS data can filter down to provide the end user with info and maps (although my explanations are rather poor). It has the drawback of costs to obtain the info, copyright, intellectual and royalty complications if you intend to reuse the info or even store it, and the storage space needed to build the database (not to mention the time to track to a specific spot). The other aspect is verifying an address that you are not located at. In this second aspect you are looking for a destination. Yes you can send a request for a general area and then use zoom-in zoom-out and pan to zero in on the address but this takes often too much time.
Back in 1995, before I had Internet here, I was faced with a delivery service who needed to quickly direct drivers to addresses, and needed to gain immediate notification of wrong or bad addresses so they could be corrected at the call center. There was hardly any time to process 1000+ addresses a day so here was my solution.
- Service 1 took phone calls and wrote down name address and ph# which they keyed into delivery software. The software looked up address in database (created by me by typing in all valid addresses for city) and an invalid address would flag in Red on the screen. A valid address could be clicked for instant on-screen map with address circled on the screen. Maps were obtained by getting permission from a map company (who didn’t want to get involved in delivery market), scan in all maps from map book and run the a simple point and click to assign an address (street) start and end to the map.
- Service 2 used a call center and sent invoices to delivery service printer. Here I intercepted the text coming over the modem and fed it into the delivery software which then only printed a condensed version (2000 pages per day became 2000 lines (20 pages)). Once more the software did it’s due diligence to notify of bad addresses.
In 2000, I improved the map quality, expanded the system to be able to create maps and address look-up for any city and put it out as SMART-MAP(North America). It died with no interest in it as people were fine with in car GPS and Internet GPS.
I used one small section of one map a short time ago to show on a business website to indicate to local customers where the business is. I immediately heard from the business that my map must be removed as it infringes upon copyright of some business I have never heard of. So long story short watch yourself! Even original work done by you is grounds for legal action if it too closely resembles copyrighted work.
In that case I’ll make my own geogrphical database. I’ll shon some countries, and say “choose one of the list” or other if not listes, and typpe it… so withe cities
Or maybe I’ll ask only obvious questions about their geog. location and that’s all. And as key_wap says I can use wikimapi or google maps as techwiz03 wrotte I can complment ll ith google maps
Thansk a lot to all
c-u
gunet74