We have been asked whether GeoKit could be made to support UK addresses and this is something that we’re interested in doing. I must admit that I was incompletely uninformed as to how different these addresses really are. Just have a look at Wikipedia has to say about UK addresses. In specific, we’ve been asked to support this geocoding service: www.postcodeanywhere.co.uk.
So since we’re looking into this, I thought it might be a good idea to solicit other suggestions for geocoding services and address variants which GeoKit doesn’t already support, but which would be useful to the Rails community. It appears there will be some refactoring involved, so it makes sense to do a little due diligence by broadening the input process.
So drop me or Andre a note or comment and let us know.
Hi Bill,
I definetely second this.
Looking forward to seeing this.
You may want to look into the geonames.org service as well.
Hi Bill,
Anything to enable UK address support would be grand. In the short term, for anyone trying to geocode UK addresses, I’ve hacked together a simple solution using GMaps screen scraping at http://www.mobaconsulting.co.uk/2007/3/3/uk-address-geocoding-with-geokit
Might be useful for others.
Rgds,
Steve
I’m looking for a AR-Model solution for multiple (international) addresses & validation of them (+international phone numbers). Not directly related to Geocoding.. but still..
Secondly I was wondering how the Geokit manages with > 1 million rows on MySQL. I created something similar to Geokit but my experience is that those queries are slow. One (still slow) solution is boundingboxing.. does Geokit support this?
Let me know!
I’ve just blogged about adding support for localsearchmaps.com to acts_as_locateable, and that may be one you’d like to look into. I’m not sure where its data comes from — maybe scraping google maps?
http://jystewart.net/process/2007/03/extending-acts_as_geocodable/
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