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GeoNames Does Geocoding for Microsoft's Popfly
posted by Satri
on Tuesday May 22, @08:02PM
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from the going-to-the-best-source dept.
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from the going-to-the-best-source dept.
The Geonames blog informs us the new Popfly mashup tool uses Geonames for geocoding. From the blog: " Popfly is kind of a foolproof, slick version of Yahoo! pipes based on the Silverlight browser plugin. For geocoding there is a predefined block GeoNames to access geonames.org web services."
Related Stories
Geonames.org as Data Provider?
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The Geospatial Semantic Web Blog describes why GeoNames.org is his favorite geo-data provider. The short entry worth the read and underlines many great features of GeoNames: "It features about 2.2 million records of geographical information. [...] Many reasons why Geonames.org is interesting: First, it provides a unified representation of geographical data from different providers. [...] Second, it provides web service API for querying geographical information. [...] Third, Geonames web service supports both JSON and XML output."
We introduced GeoNames a few months ago.
Industry: Yahoo! Pipes and Geospatial 2 comments
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Last week Yahoo! announced Pipes,an interactive feed aggregator and manipulator. Slashdot discusses it, but doubtlessly more pertinent, the Google Earth Blog and Ogle Earth have entries on how Pipes relates to geospatial technologies. From the GEB: "The full concept may be a little tricky to grasp if you are not a technologist, but in a nutshell it enables you to easily take the output from one Internet site and feed it to another site as an input which then lets you do something new with the data. [...] Google Earth already has some aspects of this in the form of the network link. A network link lets you get the KML from another server somewhere which may tap into other data to provide you with dynamic content in GE" From OE: "For neogeographers in particular this will be something of a big bang, I suspect.
How? For starters, Kevin Cheng's examples output GeoRSS by default, and the entire "pipe" is geospatially enabled."
GeoNames Webservice Client for Java r0.5 Released
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GeoNames has been covered regularly on Slashgeo (see related stories below), but not the GeoNames Webservice Client which just released Java r0.5. The post: "
Version 0.5 of the GeoNames Webservice Client for Java has been released today. The release includes support for all four administrative levels, a bug fix for the address reverse geocoder, addition of timezone to Toponyms, enumeration for the feature class, and some minor changes.
Java is by far not the only programming language you find GeoNames client libraries for. Some libraries we know about are :
* Java : GeoNames Webservice Client
* Ruby : GeoNams Ruby API
* Perl : Geo-GeoNames
* Python : geopy
* Python : geoname.py by Zindep
* Lisp : cl-geonames
* PHP : SOLMETRA Maps"
GeoNames for Drupal 5
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serosero writes "The GeoNames webservices are now avaialable for the thousands of Drupal (Open Source Content Management System) users with the GeoNames API for Drupal. All XML-based services are supported by the API, and the information is conveniently available through a standardized function."
Batch Geocoding for Europe via Yahoo! REST Geocoding Engine
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Via Spatially Adjusted, I learned the BatchGeocode.com free tool now supports European countries: "Yahoo Maps Added Recently added support for geocoding in Europe. Now you can geocode and get map coordinates for these countries: Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Great Britain, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Ireland, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, France, and Italy. [other countries have limited support, see the blog entry]" See the previous story on BatchGeocode.com and other related stories below.
Facebook Virtual Earth Mashup using PopFly and Geonames
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Not groundbreaking, but the Microsoft Virtual Earth blog links to a tutorial to use MS's PopFly and Geonames to generate a map mashup of Facebook friends. Here's the resulting mashup. From the site: "Microsoft Popfly is a web application that lets you build mashups without any coding. You get a dashboard with differnt blocks already lined up for you. You can choose the blocks and then connect them around. Each block will give options corresponding to the service say for facebook you can choose from the drop down menu all the fuctions like getfriends, getpics etc. Choose one of the functions and pass the data on to the next block to process. We created a small mashup between facebook, virtual earth and geonames." Related, AnyGeo informs us of the Facebook GIS group. This is closely related to this previous story on Geonames and Microsoft Popfly and the mapping add-on for Facebook and MySpace which was sold $3M.
OpenGeocoding.org
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I recently stumbled onto the OpenGeocoding.org website: "What?
This site contains two applications. One is submitting the address and another one is geocoding application. The geocoding application will retrieved the information about the address either from database or from Google Maps.
This site offers geocoding service for users and offers several output format.
Why?
The attempts to create an open source server hosting geocoded addresses which could be retrieved through querying them have even been very scarce.
This site offer free geocoding, implement gathering data by and for community and independent from commercial solution." I copied below a few related tools previously discussed.
New Geocode Format with Short URL Service
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Anonymous Voxel writes "A new geocoding format and a web service which explores it have been made public yesterday at geohash.org.
According to the Wikipedia article, Geohashes offer properties like arbitrary precision, similar prefixes for nearby positions, and the possibility of gradually removing characters from the end of the code to reduce its size (and gradually lose precision). The algorithm has been put in the public domain, which is interesting, as Microsoft holds a patent on an algorithm with similar purposes." Added a few geocoding services below in related stories.
According to the Wikipedia article, Geohashes offer properties like arbitrary precision, similar prefixes for nearby positions, and the possibility of gradually removing characters from the end of the code to reduce its size (and gradually lose precision). The algorithm has been put in the public domain, which is interesting, as Microsoft holds a patent on an algorithm with similar purposes." Added a few geocoding services below in related stories.
Application Domains: GeoNames Web Services Goes Commercial
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GeoNames announced they're now offering commercial web services. From the entry: "A commercial version of our popular web services is now available to everybody. The commercial web services offer faster response time and higher uptime than their free siblings and come with two types of service level agreements. We recommend that professional users and mission critical applications upgrade to this premium service."
GeoNames frequently made the headlines here. See also selected stories below.
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