On Jun 16, 2005, at 7:51 PM, Joel Gwynn wrote: > Of course, until Google Maps is officially released, and until the get > more specific about their TOS, this is all just having fun.
Not to nitpick, but the Maps TOS basically says, "See our primary TOS" - which explicitly forbids commercial usage. It's funny you mentioned this, because at $WORK I'm faced with the problem of geocoding a whole bunch of addresses for our database. And since most searches on the database are radius searches, lat/long is rather important. In our case, a lot of the addresses already have lat/long. But many of them are incorrect, which is worse than missing! So I have about 75k addresses that need to be redone. The few commercial services I've looked at would be quite expensive. One option we've used in the past is just doing zipcode centroid matching. You can get this information for ~$100. But obviously this is less accurate. In my case, I'm not sure if the hit in accuracy is too much. I need to do more checking. Has anyone used commercial services and been happy with the price/results? In the case of using the TIGER/Line dataset, how accurate is it? Drew > > On 6/16/05, Ricker, William <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> Joel, >> >> Neat demo of Google MAPS API! And wicked elegant, pulling the hidden >> XML >> reply packet out for data. I like it. For occasional use, this is >> awesome. >> >> For serious bulk geocoding (anything beyond Eagle's free 50 samples, >> anything worth automating), using Google is both overkill and way too >> chatty on the network. A local Geo::Coder::US TIGER/DB would handle >> bulk >> geocoding all in-house. And I suspect the GoogleMaps API terms of >> service will crack down on excessive commercial use ... and unclear if >> Google Maps will be updating their Geocoding data with exception >> reports >> as assiduously as the commercial providers are. >> >> http://geocoder.us/ is available both online and offline, free*, using >> Geo::Coder::US and TIGER/Line DB. >> >> * The Geocoder.US WebService and on-line data is under a >> **NonCommercial-ShareAlike** license, so not considered Free Software >> under the Debian definition, not useable for business/commercial >> purposes w/o paying. (But their prices are a bargain for commercial >> use >> compared to the competition.) The >> http://search.cpan.org/~sderle/Geo-Coder-US/ module however has the >> Perl >> license, specified as 5.8.3 or later. And the data is USGovt >> Copyright, >> which is both Free and Libre as well. So if you download the data and >> PMs and build your own DB, it's apparently FLOSS usable commercially >> ... >> even under the Debian definition ... w/o need for webservice >> connection. >> Which is a win if you have enough of it to do, and don't need to pay >> someone to update the database with corrections. >> >> I make extensive use of geocoder.us in cleaning the data for my (very >> non-commercial) Perl+PHP+MySQL mapping project at >> http://ema.arrl.org/fd/fd_dir.php (which charts the sites you can see >> Ham Radio in action in Easter Mass in a little over a week, June >> 25-26, >> Field Day weekend). >> >> >> Cheers, >> >> Bill Ricker >> Not speaking for The Firm >> aka N1VUX >> >> > > _______________________________________________ > Boston-pm mailing list > Boston-pm@mail.pm.org > http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm _______________________________________________ Boston-pm mailing list Boston-pm@mail.pm.org http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
