blog.humaneguitarist.org

Geolocation/geocoding is so "hip" these days. Everyone's so obsessed where where they and other things are. There's almost a comparison with 3-D filmmaking …

Funny. Not too many folks seem all that concerned with when things are.

Anyway …

At work, we have a database with all the libraries we serve and their addresses. And the other week we needed to quickly make a map with all their locations.

If necessity is the mother of invention, laziness is it's favorite uncle.

Enter BatchGeo. We were able to take those values from our database and get a map generated in minutes. But it gets better.

One of the nice things about this process is that in addition to a map, you also get a KML file download option. Taking this little XML file, it's a simple process (via XSL or other) to make a delimited file containing the inputted names of institutions and their latitude and longitude (altitude is also available).

From there, it's not brain surgery to get those coordinates into a database and using an SQL JOIN to be able to push out an institution's name and now its coordinates, too, whenever.

Just in case someone wants/needs to do something similar with an address book or a list of businesses, etc.

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I'm currently working with some folks on a pilot project to build a shared index of digital collection metadata from libraries in North Carolina. My part entails harvesting the metadata and indexing it with Solr.

Since most of the stuff is North Carolina centric, I thought it might be neat to use the API that the index will have to drag a marker on a map and then use the marker location to send a search to the index. My co-worker also wants to do something similar so people can search using a map marker for a project of hers. So, I thought I'd investigate.

I wanted to see how easy it was to do this with the Google Maps API and, well, it is pretty easy. Especially, since I found this marker dragging example.

There's lot of stuff that can be done, like dynamically populating the page with a set of results via AJAX but for now I'm just using the city name plus a pre-written string to create a search string that the user has to manually click.

In the little example I made (below), I'm using my home state of South Carolina. If you move the marker within SC and drop it, a simple search string is created for sending a search, ironically, to Bing Maps for the term "restaurants" and that city.

I think a search like this is really for fun, but it might be a nice way to search and learn a little geography along the way. I've also got an idea for a game using this kind of search that's sort of a spin on Concentration for digital collections, but I'll write that up later. I'm hungry and need to start enjoying my Saturday. Looking at these restaurants searches is making me even hungrier.

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• geo this, geo that: easy acquisition of KML files with BatchGeo