Andrew Ross wrote:
Thank you everyone for the great response to this post.
I'd like to poll everyone's thoughts regarding the appropriate next
steps. It seems to me we have good support for this initiative.
It isn't as clear to me yet what the best way forward is. My instincts
are leaning towards spending time to capture requirements, identify key
use cases, and crucial standards. The thinking is that with this
information captured, we're in a better position to review the
implementations available to identify which candidates are best
positioned to satisfy those needs.
yeah, this sounds about right, use cases or requirements are a good
start. Here are some of mine:
Use any dataset with some minimal requirements? For example, Navteq,
TeleAtlas, Tiger, Canadian NRN data, OpenStreetMap, other local statsets.
API that can easily be called from C or C++ applications code or an
apache web service, or be SWIG'ed to various scripting languages.
The ability to pass a full address as a single field, or to be able to
pass data already split into fields.
Should be capable of returning approximate results based on fuzzy searches.
Results should be scored and sorted with best first.
I would like to see the backing stores for the geocoder to be SQL based
and configurable between, SQLite, Postgresql, others.
The ability to support multiple countries and languages. This has an
implication for parsing and standardizing data. We should be able to add
support for a new country by installing some additional datafiles or tables.
I would like to echo Andrew Turner's comments that we're focusing on
API's that can be used offline rather than a web service. (though it's
good to see great web service projects out there!)
Having a good API is critical because it is trivial to write various
versions of applications as shells about the API. For example:
1) fetch command arguments, call api, print results -- commandline tool
2) fetch web request, call api, return results as xml -- CGI service
3) SWIG API, script interface for perl, python, .NET, etc
4) etc
-Steve W
Input, thoughts, feedback are greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance,
Andrew
*From:* [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] *On Behalf Of *Andrew Ross
*Sent:* November 5, 2008 7:59 PM
*To:* OSGEO Discussion list
*Subject:* [OSGeo-Discuss] Anyone interested in geocoding and routing?
Hi Everyone,
A few of us have been talking and thought the timing might be right to
try and start projects to work on Geocoding and Routing. We're still
gathering information and checking to learn who's interested.
If you are interested, please check out the following wiki's and add
your name in the section you are interested in.
http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/OpenGeocoder
http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/OpenRouter
There are experts out there that are far more knowledgeable about
Geocoding and Routing than I am. To these good people: please feel
empowered to make modifications, provide feedback in whatever way you
feel most comfortable.
Thanks,
Andrew
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