Re: What about Reverse Geocoding?

Wouldn't the simple thing to do be to just provide in the API a way to 
deliver location as a civic address?  See [1] and [2] for the some ideas 
on how you might structure such an object.

That way, a location provider that knows natively about a civic address 
can provide it, and a location provider that only knows geodetic 
location can geocode.  This would leave the whole question whether and 
how to geocode out of the API, leaving it up to the location provider.

--Richard

[1] <http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4119>
[2] <http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5139>



Greg Bolsinga wrote:
> 
> 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 Friday, 7 November 2008 08:23:40 UTC