Is there any way to add a business with complete information (with address, geospatial location, categories, trading hours etc) to Google Places in a programmatic fashion?
We want to add new franchises to a listing of stores. Manual changes are too brittle, the bulk upload takes a long time to be confirmed and the standard Places API has only a very limited method on it. Am I missing something or is there no support for managing your own store listings via an API?
I don't think you're missing anything at this time. Support for that sort of thing is currently limited to what's documented at the link you provide, I believe.
The Places stuff is in the odd grey area where Google is kind of pushing it and promoting it, but also saying that it's just in Labs, it's just experimental, etc., so it may not have all the features you need.
There might be other ways to get your businesses into Google Maps, if your concern is Google Maps generally and not the Google Places stuff specifically. If they exist, they may have more fully featured API capabilities for updates. Or this might be a big dead end.
If this issue is closer to a big annoyance instead of a total dealbreaker, then the approach I'd recommend, if you can wait long enough, would be to implement what you can in the existing API, and keep an eye on the API docs to see if they add more capabilities in the coming months. Open a feature request for Places API in the issue tracker and maybe keep an eye on other features requests there, especially issue 2431.
Related
We are looking into ways of visualizing Issues and Rfi’s (minimally) as geopositioned items in our GIS (Geographic Information System). We achieved some interesting results, though looking at automating the process, ideally, I would like to have data pushed to me as opposed to have to manually pull it. The obvious solution is to use Webhooks Events. A list of exposed webhooks is available here but there is nothing related to Issues and Rfi’s. I was wondering what is the roadmap for Forge Webhooks.
Is there another way to achieve the same “Push” effect?
Is there a plan to expose Issues and Rfi’s events to Webhooks? (Creation, status, modifications…)
Notification is something we often hear. We have a wish as a future enhancement. But I don't think it's in our radar for near future. (RFI, for example, access API itself is still to come.) We will be announcing new APIs through our newsletter or on our documentation. But feel free to check back say in 3-6 months to see where we are.
For now, we will need to check back periodically.
I want to know how to read the traffic information from google map as here in the following image. Google only displays the traffic layer by red, green, and yellow lines. But how can an application identify the color and find out how much traffic there is between source and destination.
Visually users can see with their eyes and identify the colors but what about the application?
Google Maps API does not expose traffic data. Your best bet is probably to find a different solution for your traffic data. Microsoft MapPoint might meet your needs.
UPDATES to answer questions in comments:
Whether there is a free service may depend on what geographic area you are concerned with. I imagine (but don't know for certain) that there may be places where government entities make the data available. Or maybe not. Regardless, generally, no, you can't get this data for free. It is expensive and challenging to collect, and no doubt Google pays someone a substantial fee for the data (and is probably forbidden from distributing raw data).
Meanwhile, the data Yahoo! offers is completely different from Google's traffic data. Yahoo! provides information about accidents, road work, etc. Google's information has to do with the actual speed of vehicles on the roadway. As far as I know, Google does not provide that information with the Maps API.
In any event, Google's raw traffic data is unavailable to your application.
As always, what various services offer can and will change and this answer may not age well. But it is, to the best of my knowledge, accurate at the current time.
I am a final year Computer Science undergraduate student from India. I want to create a WPF application that displays 3D buildings like in the latest Google maps 5 for android. This will be the basis of my final year project. I have some questions before i start working on this.
Should I make it desktop or web based, or should I use the web to store some metadata and render the data in the desktop software?
For 3D display of buildings in a map area, is WPF enough or will I need knowledge of XNA and Direct X too?
Will this violate Google Maps TOS if I use Google Maps API? (I want to do something Google Maps does not provide in India) Is using Bing Maps a better option?
Is it feasible to read building elevations and rendering them using the above mentioned Maps APIs? Is it that the elevation data available through Google Maps API is only for the terrain and not for individual buildings?
I have three months to complete this project and have given details of the technologies I intend to work with.
Will I need in-depth knowledge of any more technologies for this?
Excuse me if I missed some detail. I am posting this from my cellphone using opera mobile. It's time we have an android client for stackoverflow.
1) That is entirely up to you. As you don't specify your target user then it is hard to say what the best way to deliver the application is. For example, if you want to be able to widely distribute it and have a high compatibility then perhaps a web-based application would be best. Conversley, if you require high performance and are targeting a specific os, chip-set, etc then a stand-alone application may be better.
2) Again, it is hard to say. WPF can certainly render 3d objects and may provide you with everything you require. If again you require more complex rendering you may also want to look at later versions of Direct3D, which can help a lot with things like HDR textures, Multi-threading, etc.
3) I am not a lawyer so I can't say for sure - even if I If I were it would still depend on the specifics of your implementation. That said, the bing maps section 2 (i) seems pretty good for you - Academic use seems pretty open as long as you make the application available publicly without restriction. The Google TOS seems more restrictive to me at least.
4) To me that would be a breech of the Google Maps/Earth TOS - The section on Restrictions on use seems pretty clear...But again, I am not a lawyer so I can't say for sure...
Just started testing Zoho Crm as a CRM solution for our company. Someone asked for a Google map on the page showing our upcoming engagements.I know Zoho provides an API that allows accessing its data from the outside, but I actually need to integrate the map on the data-entry form.If anyone could provide a pointer to any mashup with Zoho CRM (be it Google MAps, Bing Maps, or any similar web service), I would be extremely grateful.
I know this is an ancient question, but since there's no answers and this is pretty much all that came up on google when searching for Zoho CRM integration with Google Maps I'll take a stab at this anyway. I recently got a similiar request, but in this case they wanted to display the leads on a page outside of Zoho.
I created a Java servlet and JSP that runs on Google App Engine. The servlet will connect to Zoho CRM to retrieve all leads and geocode the addresses they are registered with. The client-side Javascript is then taking care of creating the markers on the map for all the addresses.
It's a bit too much code to paste here (although not that much), but you can check it out at http://code.google.com/p/zohomap/.
I put the demo up at http://zohomap.appspot.com/.
I know this is an old question, but it came up on Google Search. About three years ago, I start a similar Google Maps integration project for SugarCRM. The JJWDesign Google Maps project is up on GitHub.com. The idea came about during a marketing meeting and quickly grew out of control.
Download at:
https://github.com/jjwdesign/JJWDesign-Google-Maps
Here are some of the pitfalls that I've experienced:
Exceeding Limits of Geocoding: The Google Maps API v3 has in place a limit of 2,500 Geocoding requests per day. It is also throttled to 10 per second. So, you'll most likely need to develop something to queue these requests. I used a CRON/Scheduled Task to handle the processing trigger.
PHP Memory Limits: The design of SugarCRM creates rather large objects for each one of it's records. Using 10,000 of these objects will usually exceed the memory allowed for PHP to execute. So, special consideration may be needed in examining the best way to pull data into the map.
Always develop/test with a large data set; 10,000+ records. This way you'll be able to more easily see inefficiencies in your code; especially JavaScript. The IE Browser has been know to cause issues with MarkerClustering.
Get ready for an explosion of interest in advanced search / filtering functionality. Also, expect to develop a large section of Admin configuration. Everyone wants something slightly different.
Cheers,
Jeff
Simple question, the answer may not be...
I'm going to be developing a web app (ASP.NET MVC) for a client. They have asked me for an opinion on whether to use Google Maps or Virtual Earth for providing a mapping solution.
Which would you go for and why? Or are there others you can recommend?
What else do you need to know?
Street view (or equivalent) won't be
necessary in the near future, but
one day it might.
The client wants to identify certain
mappable features, and beyond that
find these features when within a
specified distance.
What else should I be considering at a high level? Or my client?
Thank you in advance.
One of your major considerations needs to be licensing if this is for a commercial web site. You'll have to contact both Google and Microsoft for exact details and pricing, but there's plenty on the web that indicates it could cost you $10k to implement these solutions in production. They get you hooked on the rapid and easy development though!
My preference is for Google Maps, it just feels a bit slicker but I have developed some pretty good prototypes with the Virtual Earth SDK before.
I don't know if Microsoft are planning an equivalent to the StreetView feature so if that is on the requirements cards in the future then stick with Google.
Either of the technologies will allow you to search for geographic features in various ways - whether via region, street address or specific latitude + longitude. They also allow you to overlay your own images or draw lines, polygons etc.
Google Maps seems to have a wider user base (even though Microsoft were technically doing this stuff before Google got into it!), so you're likely to find more help out on the intarweb when implementing your solution than for Microsoft.
More info on Google Maps for Enterprise is located here:
http://www.google.com/enterprise/maps/map_info.html
You should be asking the client for a reasonably comprehensive list of requirements for the mapping solution. You've mentioned one - these "mappable features". Are there any others?
Once you've got the list you can then see which one provides the best fit and go with that.
If Street View is definitely on the horizon then you have to go with Google - or is it something that's just come up in conversation?
Having said that, for a little bit more effort you could write an abstraction layer that sits between your application and the mapping solution so that if the one you didn't choose provides a better fit in the future it would be easier to make the change. Though this does go against the Agile methodology (YAGNI).