Hi Joan,

Op 13-6-2011 9:18, Joan Creus schreef:

It would be definitely great. But unfortunately, in the documentation there is the message:

Note: the Geocoding API may only be used in conjunction with a Google map; geocoding results without displaying them on a map is prohibited. For complete details on allowed usage, consult the Maps API Terms of Service License Restrictions http://code.google.com/apis/maps/terms.html#section_10_12.

We're displaying the items on a map, just not right away :-)

So... maybe we could contact Google? No commercial usage, maybe they would accept it.

I'm a bit afraid of the big bureaucratic monster.

Maarten

Joan.

2011/6/13 Maarten Dammers <maarten@mdammers.nl mailto:maarten@mdammers.nl>

Hi everyone,

I was looking at the statistics [1] and I noticed we have quite some
items without coordinates. Did anyone already try to use the Google
Geocoding API [2] to get the coordinates? Would probably be a good way
to quickly get a lot of items on the map.

Maarten

[1]
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/wiki/Commons:Wiki_Loves_Monuments_2011/Monuments_database#Statistics
[2] http://code.google.com/intl/nl/apis/maps/documentation/geocoding/

Hi Jean-Frédéric,

Op 13-6-2011 11:38, Jean-Frédéric schreef:

2011/6/13 Maarten Dammers <maarten@mdammers.nl mailto:maarten@mdammers.nl>

Did anyone already try to use the Google Geocoding API [2] to get
the coordinates?

I did. I put together a proof of concept using Google Docs, see <https://spreadsheets.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AjZN8eBGaLjSdGg5WDY3OUF... https://spreadsheets.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AjZN8eBGaLjSdGg5WDY3OUFJRmk0NmNLRFFLSnJ6ckE&hl=en_US&authkey=CNSs97UN>

This uses OSM API and GMaps API - At first look, OSM does not return that great results, GMaps works better.

Looks cool!

I was unsure of what to do with it (whether or not it was precise enough to mass-geoloc items)

A coordinate is better than no coordinate at all. From that point on we can start improving coordinates. We need of course somehow to indicate that the coordinate is derived and might contain errors. On the other hand: The coordinates we get from sources also contain errors so there is no real difference. I do wonder if the error rates are about the same.

Maarten

To my understanding, Poulpy already did something along those lines - can you confirm ?

-- Jean-Frédéric

Op 13-6-2011 12:55, Federico Leva (Nemo) schreef:

It would be interesting to find also the coordinates of other items via Google Maps and OSM and then compare them to the ones provided by the institutions to see how big the difference is among the the various sources.

That sure sounds interesting! Anyone willing to do this bit of research? You can pull the addresses and coordinates from the monuments database at the toolserver [1]. You can either do it at the Toolserver or use the mysql dump to do it at your own computer.

Maarten

[1] https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/wiki/Commons:Wiki_Loves_Monum...

Strainu,

We put a tool to manually fill in the gaps, where we use the technique of positioning as near as possible using municipaly, district, Portugal with gmaps API). If you're willing to manually fill in the coordinates, I can pass you the code (you should adapt it to you database schema, though): http://wlm.wikimedia.pt/tools/plist

As a quick start, I'd suggest you to get a dump of wikipedia and import some coordinates from templates like {{coord}}, etc, although the optimal would be to get lists from official sources....