My company is using the Google Maps API to power an installer locator for our product. All has been going fine up until now, when I've added installers on the Channel Islands (UK). Is there any way I can get the Google Maps API to recognize these locations for me?
The Channel Islands are editable in Google Mapmaker, which means you can fix most geocoding problems if you happen to know the right answer. Not all fixes will go live immediately, but they will eventually.
There isn't! Geolocation in the channel islands (as provided by google) is very patchy. It doesn't seem to recognize postcodes, for instance.
My company is based on Jersey. On our site, we geolocate a user, then place a marker on the map as to where we think they are. We set this marker to 'draggable', and allow the user to drag the marker to their location if its inaccurate. You can get info on how precisely you have located someone from the API - if its not good enough, you can give extra prompts to tell the user to locate themselves.
This isn't an ideal solution, but its important to have - geolocation services do not work accurately everywhere in the world.
Related
Would it be possible make Google maps aware of our beacons via their registry or api or something, so that google map can accurately give indoor direction to users in a facility that is under our control(where we can deploy beacons)?
Example: In a mall we own, can we place beacons and submit them to Google Maps so it can give better results?
Some links I found, but can't figure out an answer:
https://developers.google.com/beacons/
https://developers.google.com/beacons/proximity/guides
https://www.google.co.in/maps/about/partners/indoormaps/
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.apps.insight.surveyor
Google used to develop this beacon-based location service call Google Here but it was scrapped due to the reasons of privacy, but then you can do the following to get your beacons locationing up.
Let say you have multiple beacons in one mall.To make this explanation simple, just treat the indoor maps and normal maps as the same thing, and those beacons you going to add are like the places in the Google Maps.
First of all you need to make your building floor plan available on the Google Maps. You can do so by using the following steps to submit your beacons location with the floor maps of the building, so that your beacons location can be automatically align with your stores/building.
https://support.google.com/maps/answer/2803784?co=GENIE.Platform%3DDesktop&hl=en
After your floor plans appear on Google Maps, you can submit your beacons location using the Map Marker tool (Retired March 2017, moved to Google Maps after that).
You can then use the Google Maps API's Map Object to work with your indoor map, including getting location of all your beacons.
https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/android-api/map#indoor_maps
The IndoorBuilding Object allows you to get the active level that you are accessing. You can use the function getLevels() to get all the levels in the building, and then use getActiveLevelIndex() to get active level you are working on.
After getting to the right floor, what is left is the interaction between Google Beacon API with the maps you created.
latLng and indoorLevel in the Proximity Beacon API would then return the exact location and detail level that your beacons located.
You can use this link to upload indoor map of a building.
https://maps.google.com/floorplans/find
Submit the details of floor and everything.
Hope it will help.
I believe there are no current plans to use registered beacons for directions indoors, or even for lat/long type location (more for semantic place inference), but I feel it is a very good FR so I went ahead and added it to the Android issue tracker:
Including support for BLE beacons in FusedLocationProvider.
Please star it to get updates.
As you can read in the other reply beacons can be used currently to improve indoor location accuracy for 3rd party apps, but it requires a lot of work by the developer and it is not supported by the Google Maps Mobile.
Apologies up front - I'm not overly technical but helping a developer partner find an answer to a problem. Feel free to be as technical as you like in response though. I'll get him to look at the answers!
We're trying to pull the location (GPS coords) of the red pin dropped in the google maps app when you do a search (on iOS or android), to use in a separate app.
The key to this is that it pulls the info you've already searched for in google maps, NOT having to search again within the second app. i.e. using google maps API in the second app is off the table.
Options so far seem to be...
1) Run an intent to request the data in the background. However, it seems that the intent has to push coordinates to the gmaps app, and can't just "ask" the coordinates of the current pin.
2) Use the google maps API to allow the user of the second app to login to their account so it can pull the account Maps history (i.e. can see the most recent place in the search history). However, it seems that the google maps API doesn't give access to this data.
3)....??
We're stumped. Any ideas?
Thanks so much!
Have you considered using a Geocoder to get the coordinate data? It'll depend on your use case (when and how "red pins" are created), but you can circumvent using maps with it.
Once again, I'm trying to deal with something not really well documented on Google Maps API.
I'm doing a small webapp which would require to be able to map indoor areas BUT I've to keep them private.
For now, I don't find any informations related to this question.
I've found many quite similar questions on stackoverflow which seems to feet my needs regarding the title, BUT once I read the question, everything is related to Android or IOS however, I'm looking to do this on a regular WebPlatform using Maps APIs provided for this plateform.
If anyone as a hint, it will really help so, thanks in advance.
The documentation for custom StreetViews you find on https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/streetview#CustomStreetView
Keeping the images private is not hard to achieve, the images are loaded directly by the client, so you may e.g. use a serverside script that handles the requests and for example checks for a valid session before it delivers the images.
According to the GoogleMaps community forum (https://support.google.com/maps/thread/124604237/how-can-i-make-indoor-maps-private?hl=en) it is not possible to render google indoor maps private. One solution could be using mapspeople api which uses google maps and draws indoor maps on a top layer, or resort to mapwize which utilizes OpenStreetMaps as a base map to draw indoor maps layers on.
https://www.mapspeople.com/mapsindoors/
https://www.mapwize.io/
note that mapspeople requires payment, while mapwize has a very basic free version.
I'm looking for a solution to be able determine landscape type by a given coordinate, for example check if current position is water/forest/town/road and so on. I found google.maps.MapTypeStyleElementType object specification in the Google Maps specification, but not sure if it could help me or not.
Probably, there are some another Maps API with such functioality? Or maybe I should refer to the different types of offline maps?
Nope, the link you send is just for styling the proper features, not to tell which feature is at a given coordinate. If you are interested in landscape, then Corine Land Cover is the thing you are looking for. It describes the types of biotops like forest, water, but also land use - meadow, field, buildings etc. However, I don't know if there is such an online service where you could query particular coordinates. Other solution for you would be to import these GIS layers (they are freely available) to your own gis map server. Maybe this is partially solved as there are e.g. projects how to incorporate these into openstreetmap.
Well not quite, but you could get close to what you're looking for by using the Google Reverse Geocoder and the Google Places API
Google Reverse Geocoding
http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/geocoding/#ReverseGeocoding
If you send the service a geocode it will send back an address type and/or one of several adress components http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/geocoding/#Types
Google Places API
http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/places/
You could use the Google places API to search for for what's near. If the geocode is in the middle of the lake, the Places API may return something like "Lake Michigan" and then you'd know the terrain obviously.
Does google maps api use an older verison of their maps? When I embed a map using google maps api, a ton of streets are missing, especially in Israel.
Check this out (this map has lots of detail and streets)
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=israel&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=41.496446,93.076172&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=Israel&z=8
Yet the embedded map hee has very little detail on Israel and relatively no streets.
Goto google maps api example page and find israel. (I couldn't post a link cause this is my first post)
Its a licensing issue. GISrael won't sell Google a universal licence to redistribute the map imagery to other people's domains.
My answer is this is probably a real or perceived security issue for Israel, which makes it an incredible headache for anyone outside of the country to produce a useful map with google map tools. (I've tried to do a map of Jerusalem, a walking tour, and found it nearly impossible to do.)