Is there maybe (although i doubt but you never know) some free (or not free) database of all areas in world (or just cities) described with geo polygons.
For example:
Soho, London : [(latitude1, longitude1), (latitude2, longitude2), (latitude3, longitude3) ... ]
I know that openstreetmap has some free stuff but I haven find anything like this.
Any information is helpful!
Thanks,
Ivan
The MapIt Global service may help. For any co-ordinate, it returns the administrative boundaries that cover it. If you have a list of cities you're interested in, you can simply query their service and get the shapes of their boundaries.
Have a look at the GeoNames web site. They have free gazetteer data sets available for world countries, including coordinates for capital cities, towns, parks, airports, business centers, etc. I know you asked for polygons but in my extensive travels across the net I haven't found anything that meets that requirement - not for free anyway.
Related
I'm in need of acquiring the coordinates of the outlines of all the water bodies inside a country, with the exception of "Sea" or "Ocean" water. Right now, I'm manually outlining the lakes and rivers but it is not a sustainable solution for the magnitude of the application I'm developing.
Even if I can only obtain the data of Lakes or Rivers, that would be a great start. I'm specifically interested in the countries of Malaysia, Brazil and the Dominican Republic.
My situation brings me to the question of, where does Google obtain its data? Are these data sets available?
Google gets this data usually from TomTom, (former TeleAtlas).
The coordinate polygons of that data is not available, at least not without paying much money.
This data is usually extracted from aerial fotos.
For research projects it might be possible to ask TomTom via your University.
An alternative professional quality source is the product NavStreets from Here (former Nokia).
For free you could try OpenStreetMap. You would get coordinates.
Unfortunateley the OpenStreetMap data is not always clean or closed polygons.
The quality depens much on the country. You can check the countries
first by looking in the web browser: https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/57963
Geofabrik.de provides OpenStreetMap data converisons and extractions of specific countries, e.g in pbf and shp file format, you might check this to.
read further here:
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Waterways
I have a number of XY coordinates and am looking to discern which country each of these are in, who knows a good service/way of doing this?
I am working with MySQL & PHP, not that its really relevant, I am o fey with consuming web services/pages and assume there must be a web-service/page somewhere which will do this, if someone can point me in the right direction that would be awesome.
How do I take: 306458,383136 and turn it into: United Kingdom (for example.)
Appreciate your responses in advance.
What you're looking for is called reverse geocoding, and e.g. Google Maps has this functionality: http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/geocoding/#ReverseGeocoding
It works from a Lat/Lon coordinate, and could return even a more precise information than only a country; note that this is only an estimate - in some places, country boundaries are somewhat tangled.
If you're looking to do this offline, or if Google's/Bing's/whoever's licensing is too strict for you (e.g. you need to do a gazillion of requests per day, or need to present the result in an unorthodox format), it's possible to run your own instance of Nominatim, feed it a data extract from OpenStreetMap (under ODbL, a much more permissive license), and query that.
For example, there's a set of boundaries available at https://wambachers-osm.website/boundaries/ - just the national boundaries, so you wouldn't need to download the entire planet map.
Is there any such functionality provided by google maps API, such that I draw a random area on google map and then through some functions in the API, receive a list of all cities and sectors that were covered under that drawn area ?
Any information or help is greatly appreciated.
No, that functionality does not exist (as far as I know, anyway). You can try to fake it by selecting a sufficient number of points in your polygon and reverse geocode them, but obviously that is an imperfect solution in terms of both performance and completeness.
Barring that, there may be resources that you can license for a fee or there may be a resource made available by the government of India that may help you solve this problem. (Or perhaps there is not. I'm speculating.)
I've a SQLServer 2008 database containing names, addresses and postcodes plus lat/ long. I have a google map with an outline "boundary" polygon drawn on it, and then the data scattered across it.
What I need to do next is to switch that to a "heat map"/ Choropleth. Googling around the implementations I can so don't look too pretty and don't "know about" uk postcode boundaries.
So I'm thinking that I will need to draw my own postcode area polygons, and then colour them with my own heat map colours. I can see how to do that "the hard way". I already have the ability to GROUP BY postcode, so the frequencies are easy; drawing the boundaries is a bit of graft with the mouse. Alternatively I could opt for a square grid, which would require more server compute but less polygon drawing.
The free Code-Point® Open database has what I think are the centroids of the post code areas; irrelevant as I need the borders (I already know which person is in which post code
Finally to the questions:
Does anyone know of a data
source for UK post code boundaries?
Fortunately I only need to code a
single city at a time, so I can draw
them by hand if necessary, but
obviously if they're already coded
somewhere that would save me graft.
I guess I'm looking preferably for
data, but if I can't find that I'll
need a map I can hand-copy.
Arethere any examples of this out
there? I'm happy to re-invent the
wheel, but not if I can steal it
first.
If you are a member of a UK academic institution you can get postcode boundaries from the UKBorders project. The boundaries may be available to non-academics, so have a browse on the Edina [http://edina.ac.uk/ukborders/] site and see...
What level of postcodes are you after? Area, sector, district, or full unit postcodes? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK_postcode
I use the downloadable Geonames database for all countries, states, counties and cities in the world, but I wonder if there is a database for streets?
So you could pick: country -> state/department/district -> (county/region) -> city -> street in whatever country you like.
Because when I do a search for a street in Google Maps I can see all the upper levels (country/region/city). Is there a database you could download for MySQL for this?
There has to be a database for this, cause there are always national companies that provide this kind of information. Where did they get it from?
Have you checked out OpenStreetMap? It is free and has a export screen that lets you download the data in XML and other formats.
Those concerned with the accruacy of the OpenStreetMap data may want to read what ITO has to say about OpenStreetMap's data for Haiti.
Enter OpenStreetMap, the wiki map of the world, CrisisMappers and an impromptu community of volunteers who collaborated to produce the most authoritative map of Haiti in existence.
If you have 5 minutes you may want to watch this TED video by Tim Berners-Lee talking about what is being done with OpenStreetMap data.
You're looking for Navteq or Tele Atlas.
They will charge lots of money.
The US Census Bureau provides what they call TIGER files, which might help you out for the US anyway... As far as freely available worldwide data I seriously doubt you're gonna find much, but many governments probably provide something similar to the TIGER files. Good luck.
I think one good solution would be Listreet
Samples seems to contain country, region, city, streets and even elevation with longitude and latitude
Prices are fair and the team behind is responsive