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GeoKit: Going International?

Filed under: GeoKit, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Uncategorized — Bill Eisenhauer at 6:18 pm on Thursday, February 22, 2007

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.

5 Comments »

1853

Comment by Saimon Moore

March 1, 2007 @ 4:18 am

Hi Bill,

I definetely second this.

Looking forward to seeing this.

You may want to look into the geonames.org service as well.

2699

Comment by Steven Mohapi-Banks

March 5, 2007 @ 5:57 am

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

3319

Comment by joost

March 8, 2007 @ 12:21 pm

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!

3839

Comment by James Stewart

March 11, 2007 @ 2:16 pm

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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Pingback by a work on process » links for 2007-03-11

March 11, 2007 @ 3:31 pm

[...] Bill Eisenhauer » GeoKit: Going International? Bill is exploring adding UK addresses to the GeoKit geocoders (tags: geocoding geokit rubyonrails) By James Stewart and filed under Notes Return to a work on process [...]

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