Re: What about Reverse Geocoding?

Hi Andrei,

On Nov 6, 2008, at 11:03 AM, Andrei Popescu wrote:

> FYI, here's the story so far:
>
> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-geolocation/2008Jun/0057.html
> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-geolocation/2008Jun/0079.html
> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-geolocation/2008Jun/0094.html

Aha! Thanks. Why I didn't think to search the archives, I don't know.

My take is that once the page has a lat/long, it needs to 'do  
something' with this raw data. Logic leads to wanting the address.

But perhaps in the vein of keeping the API simple, I may be convinced  
it is best to not require the reverse lookup.

But I can see that many web developers using Geolocation would want to  
display something to the user, and lat/long, while perfectly accurate,  
isn't what a typical user would care to see. So then the developer  
would need to send the lat/long to a server, and then do the address  
lookup there.

Currently, without any reverse lookup, all that I can see the  
Geolocation API being useful for is tracking someone's movements (via  
watchPosition) while they have a Geolocation using page open.

> Gears' implementation of Geolocation API has an extension that
> provides reverse-geocoding:
>
> http://code.google.com/apis/gears/api_geolocation.html#positionoptions
> http://code.google.com/apis/gears/api_geolocation.html#address

This looks interesting. Those seem to map the to keys in the Google  
Maps JSON quite nicely! ;)

If a UA should decide to 'extend' the API as Google Gears does above,  
does it still adhere to the specification?

Thanks,
-- Greg

Received on Thursday, 6 November 2008 19:21:47 UTC