I lost track of this effort years ago but have need to geocode thousands of addresses nightly. I must use the very accurate database sitting on the machine, installed when the Nuvi map update installed Mapsource.
When I contacted Garmin years ago, they expressed an interest in providing an API for this, but then I heard nothing and did not follow up. Their database is provided by navtec? I believe. Anyone have experience with that format?
I posted on the Garmin Developer forum a while ago, but its a little lethargic over there :)
Has anyone done this?
Does anyone know how it might be done without an API; meaning database structure and calls?
I'll take a solution in any language.
Added:
Garmin has expressed an interest in making this available to me. They just have not done it.
I do not know the database format.
I am NOT looking for an online solution or any other "alternative". This question is very specific.
Talk to Navtec directly. They will sell you or license you their database directly. The database tables are clearly documented, then write your own Geocoder on top. Took me about a week 4 years ago, and I was marginally profficient in SQL at the time.
You can geocode up to 10,000/day by city with NN4D after you get their free application key.
You can geocode for $18 per 1,000 with CoreLogic (aka Proxix)
Yahoo looked most promising because it has the Hadoop feature, which is also currently being utilized at Navteq. I've contacted a guy at Navteq who uses Hadoop, and I'm awaiting his feedback. According to Ben Lorica's article on Datameer O'Reilly.com entitled "Big Data Tool for Business Analysts", Datameer can upload from spreadsheets to Hadoop. Hadoop is a pipeline to Navteq.
Starting point - a list of the tools at the GIS Dept at USC
(I can only have one link because I'm new, but I'll add the rest when I get my points up.
naveteq uses oracle format
BUT HOLD 1 SECOND:
doing 1000 lookups(per night) is easy,
doing 10000 lookups(per night) requires a good server,
doing 1000000 lookups(per night) requires a cluster
letting them do the searches requires less hardware(and more traffic) using xml-rpc or similar rpc would be the best( for everyone)
buy oracle db and start working
you can use almost anything BUT keeping in mind the volume you should use a compile language like c++
gpsbabel.org has lots of stuff on converting between lots of GPS formats, and a downloadable tool. My limited experience, mostly with google maps, streetview etc. is that geocoding is not very accurate.
cM
The free IBM DB2 Express-C DBMS comes with Spatial Extender that can be used to GEOcode US addresses. See a webinar on this. Don't know if this is exact fit but it can't hurt to take a look.
Also take a quick look the DB2 documentation http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/db2luw/v9r7/topic/com.ibm.db2.luw.spatial.topics.doc/doc/csbp3008.html
Related
Has anyone have good experience using SQLAPI++ Library? (connecting C++ and SQL)
What do you recommend, I have a local server, SQL server 2008 and Windows XP.
Do you have a funcional example to connect c++ and sql server?, just to do a simple
SELECt * FROM mytable;
in C++?
My first impression is that SQLApi++ is great. Here is a bit of background.
I have been using ADO for a long time, but it's starting to give some COM errors for some users, without any helpful information. Also, msado??.tlb is not backwards-compatible so you have to be careful about all your users being on the same version. I understand this might not apply to you, but I figured I would share this anyway.
I started looking into SQLApi++ a few days ago and have almost only good things to say. The only draw-back I have found so far is that there is no way to know how many rows you get back without going to the result set. Also, it isn't free. On the positive side, the API is intuitive, the documentation is good, and the examples are useful. It is blazingly fast by comparison to ADO. Instead of copy/pasting, take a look at http://www.sqlapi.com/Examples/step4.cpp.
The SQLApi++ is supported since 2000. The last update was few months ago. The site is not updated most probably because it is good enough as it is - couple of useful examples, documentation, history and support. That it is just a plus if they don't update site very often that means their examples and etc. are not changed, which means the api is stable and you don't have to change your code in order to use the latest technologies.
Sounds good, indeed, but the site hasn't been updated for a long time now :(
I am kind of new to Geocoding. What I want to do is pull a bunch of names of places from the DB, and display them as markers on the page. And then allow people to choose different options which would force another db query, which would place a number of new markers on the page.
Is that possible? It seems like relatively simple functionality, but since I am not good at JSON, it is giving me a hard time.
Thanks,
Alex
There are lots of ways to geocode and really you need to give more information!
For example, in an offline environment, MapPoint is a pretty good solution (costs about $200/300 license). It can be made to work on a webserver but isn't usually worth the effort.
For a web server, then I would look at a web service. These are usually limited for free use, or pay for heavier (or commercial) use. Your question is too wide to give specifics, but look at the web services provided by Bing Maps, Google Maps, Yahoo (yes they're still around), and OpenStreetMaps-based. bing Maps and Google Maps look like they'll be around for a long time - but might cost, depending on your application. OpenStreetMaps promises to have the widest coverage (including non NAm/EUR countries), but probably doesn't have the coverage of the others, yet.
After figuring this out, I made a tool that takes an address and converts it to lat/lng. It also has a code tutorial: http://comehike.com/utils/address_to_geolocation.php
I hope it helps people. Would be fun to get feedback too :)
What I am looking for is a tool that easily or automatically sends coldfusion error messages to their system.
Then I can use the web-based interface, to manage priorities, track who fixed what and so forth.
But I want to use this to help us deal with errors better, but also to show the importance of a bug tracking system to my fellow works.
System Requirements: Apache, Windows, Coldfusion 8 Standard, Sql Server 2005.
Financial Requirements: Free or Open Source
Goal Or Purpose: To encourage my fellow workers to want and use a bug tracking system.
Does this re-write make more sense?
Thanks
Craig
Wiki has a list of issue tracking software, maybe this list could help.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_issue_tracking_systems
You may be able to find a hosted service and use either email or web services to create the ticket using onError. With that said, a simple issue tracking app could be created for your site using the same DB used to drive the content. 2 or 3 tables would take care of the data storage and you're already using CF so the application layer is already there.
HTH.
I have been heavily using this type of a setup for several years by email only, and the last 3 years with a Bug Tracking Software.
I must say, the bug tracking software has made my life so much more peaceful. Nothing is left, forgotten, or slips through the cracks. It's easy to find trends in errors, and remember "all the times" it happened.
Our setup is like this:
1) Coldfusion + Appropriate framework with error reporting - It doesn't matter what you use. I have used Fusebox extensively and am making the transition to ColdBox. Both are very capable, in addition to Mach-II, FW/1, Model-Glue, etc. The key part you have to find in them is their ability to catch "onError", usualy in the application CFC.
2) Custom OnError Script - Wherever an error occurs, you want to capture the maximum amount of information about that error and email it in. What we do is, when an error occurs, we log the user out with a message of "oops, log in again". Before logging them out, the application captures the error and emails it to Fogbugz. Along with it, at the top we include the CGI variables for the IP address, browser being used, etc. Over time you will find the things you need to add.
3) Routing in Fogbugz. A 2 user version of Fogbugz is free, and hosted online. There are two main ways to submit bugs. One is to email one in at a time. So if an error happens 2000 times, you get 2000 emails, and 2000 cases. Not always the best to link them together, etc. They have a feature called BugzScout, which is essentially an HTTP address that you do a form post to with cfform with all of the same information you would have put into the email. There's plenty of documentation on this and something I've always wanted to get around to. I had a scenario of 2000 emails for the first time happen a few weeks ago so I'll be switching over to this.
Hope that helps. Share what you ended up doing and why so we all can learn too!
I'm surprised no one mentioned LighthousePro (http://lighthousepro.riaforge.org). Open source - 100% free - and ColdFusion. As the author I'm a bit biased though. :)
Hard question to answer not knowing what kind of restrictions are there? Do you have any permissions to install anything? Also most bug-tracking systems require some kind of database support.
I have a suggestion. You can put in place a basic bug-tracking system, that just allows people to create tickets, and allows you/someone else to close it.
More Windows based tools are mentioned here
Good open-source bug tracking / issue tracking sofware for Windows
Any reason why coldfusion specifically?
I really like Fogbugz from the makers of Stack Overflow. For one user it's quite reasonably priced. I enter some bugs manually and have others emailed in.
A lot of bug tracking software will expose SOAP methods for entering data into them.
For example, we used Axosoft's OnTime and that exposed some WSDL pages that I consumed in my application. I was told that Jira did as well.
There are few in CF411 list: Bug Tracking/Defect Tracking/Trouble Ticket/Help Desk Tools Written in CFML
We use HopToad. There is another bug-tracking app called LightHouse that integrates with HopToad so you can easily create a [bug] ticket from an incoming exception. HopToad has an API of which there are many clients, you want the CF based one:
http://github.com/timblair/coldfusion-hoptoad-notifier
Even if you dont use HopToad and you end up using a different service or roll your own, if you needed to write your own API client you could leverage the code or pattern(s) of the above HopToad client.
A lot of good information from everyone, and I really do appreciate the efforts given. But not the answer i was looking for. Which maybe means, that what i want does not exist, yet.
So i may have to roll my own solution...Or maybe integrate with another existing app...
Thank You all.
I am assessing some tools to manage software develpment projects. Dotproject seems a good one, but i would like to learn of other's experinces using it for software development.
Thanks.
I've been using Assembla for a small team and loving it. The web interface is very elegant, and it gives me power and simplicity at the same time.
My favorite feature is the strong ticketing system which allows me to create tickets on the web, assign them to developers, associate them with other tickets, estimate the time it takes to close the ticket, and aggregate those times graphically. It really shines, though, with its version control and ticket integration. Being able to specify that this commit is related to ticket #45, fixes bug #78, and closes ticket #32 is very nice.
They offer version control hosting for multiple version control systems - including SVN and GIT.
They offer free and paid packages.
For more information, check out their usage videos here.
Oh, and do let us know what you decide and why :)
An old post, I know...
I used to be a core member of the dotproject team and used it for years and set up many organizations on it... ranging from small non-profits and software shops to major government projects. It tended to work relatively well. Unfortunately, due to the crawl of development, half the dotproject team split to form web2project and we've been there almost two years.
At present, we (web2project) does a quarterly release and have done major work on the code. We've closed ~100+ bugs, added dozens of features like iCal feeds, and improved performance by 95% and cut about 1/3 of the code overall. And yes, we have an upgrade path from dotProject.
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Is there any library (or even better, web service) available which can convert from a latitude/longitude into a time zone?
I looked fairly deeply into this question for a project I am working on. GeoNames.org and EarthTools.com are both good options for many situations but with the following serious flaws:
GeoNames.org finds the time zone by searching for the nearest point in their database that contains a time zone field. This often leads to the wrong result near borders. It is also painfully slow, leading to query times on the order of a couple seconds per request. It also doesn't return a valid time zone if there is no item in their database near the query point. GeoNames also restricts the number of queries that can be made per day, making bulk operations difficult.
EarthTools.org uses a map and is able to return queries quickly, but it doesn't take into account daylight savings time for most locations, and it returns a raw offset rather than a time zone ID (i.e., they return "GMT-7" instead of "America/Chicago"). Also, I just looked at their page while preparing this post and Google Chrome warned about malware on their site. That is new to me and it may change, but is obviously a cause for concern.
These flaws meant that these existing tools were not suitable for my needs so I rolled my own solution and have published it for general use. You can find it here:
http://www.askgeo.com/
AskGeo is based on a time zone map of the world, so it returns a valid time zone for every valid latitude and longitude. It returns the standard time zone ID (e.g., "America/Los_Angeles") used on Linux and most other operating systems and programming frameworks. It also returns the current offset, taking full account of daylight savings time.
It is extremely easy to use and usage is documented on the main page of the site. The API supports batch queries, so if you need to do a lot of look-ups, please use the batch interface rather than bog down our servers with serial requests. The bulk queries are also much faster, so everybody wins.
When we first launched this, we built it on Google App Engine (GAE) and made it free to all users. This was possible because GAE's prices were so low at that time. Since then, our server load has increased substantially and GAE's prices went way up. Both factors combined led us to switch to Amazon Web Services for hosting and to start charging for commercial use, while keeping the service free for non-profit, non-commercial open source projects, and researchers. For commercial users, we provide 1000 free queries to let potential customers evaluate the API to make sure it meets their needs. See the web site for pricing and terms.
The underlying library was written in Java and due to popular demand, we also released the library under a commercial license. Full documentation of the library and pricing details are on the web site.
I hope this is useful. It certainly was useful for the project I was working on.
Take a look at Geonames.org
It's a free webservice that allow you to get a lot of informations from a long/lat
They also provide a free (and open source) Java Client for GeoNames Webservices library (library for other language also provided: ruby, python, perl, lisp...)
Here's some info you can get from long/lat: (complete list of webservices here)
Find nearest Address
Find nearest Intersection
Find nearby Streets
Elevation
Timezone
Timezones are now available via Google API
https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/timezone/
The Yahoo places API provides timezone information via reverse geolocation.
Check it out.
http://developer.yahoo.com/geo/placefinder/guide/requests.html
Eric Muller has made shapefile maps for the timezones of the tz (Olson) database. A few minor caveats, though:
The boundaries used are often unofficial.
It isn't updated as regularly as the tz database itself, so some newly-formed or -adjusted zones may be missing.
Those aside, however, it seems to be very accurate for most purposes.
How much accuracy do you need? Dividing the longitude by 15 would almost be right :p
Project dead :-/
These look pretty promising-
Archive link:
https://web.archive.org/web/20150503145203/http://www.earthtools.org/webservices.htm
DRT Engine takes a latitude, longitude and local datetime and returns a timezone offset. This can be used to establish the timezone of a particular location at a future date.