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.
Related
My friend and I are building a standard coffee shop finder app to explore the google places and maps api.
We want to know if we can save google data (just like the name, placeID, lat, long, and maybe type) to user's devices so that our users could see these places - their favourites - as markers on the map, without needing to be connected to the internet.
We are thinking that we could save this information to core-data on the user's device and save just the placeIDs on our server (connected to the users profile) so as not to break Google's caching rules. We are wondering if this would in fact infringe on Google's rules. Any help or insight would be appreciated as Google's documentation on this area is a bit ambiguous.
Also if possible we would like to save some information other then the place IDs to our server. So we are wondering if a business name retrieved from Google's web service api is considered Google's property or is that something we could store on our server? Thanks in advance!
The caching policy is set in section 10.5 d of Google Maps API Terms of Service. You can temporarily save the data for the purpose of improving the performance:
No caching or storage. You will not pre-fetch, cache, index, or store any Content to be used outside the Service, except that you may store limited amounts of Content solely for the purpose of improving the performance of your Maps API Implementation due to network latency (and not for the purpose of preventing Google from accurately tracking usage), and only if such storage:
is temporary (and in no event more than 30 calendar days);
is secure;
does not manipulate or aggregate any part of the Content or Service; and
does not modify attribution in any way.
https://developers.google.com/maps/terms#section_10_5
Please also note that place ID is exempt from this rule and you can store place IDs without any restrictions. This is documented here:
https://developers.google.com/places/place-id#save-id
Hope this clarifies your doubts.
I am looking into different maps providing traffic data, comparing the data and traffic information they provide (I'm located in Denmark (Odense) so not everyone has data for that region).
The two most obvious are Google Maps and Bing Maps, both who provide traffic information on their default map.The thing is, I need not only the map but numbers and the data behind the traffic. From my research, it seems that Google doesn't provide any service or API exposing this data, but Bing does.
Does anyone here know how accurate both maps are when displaying traffic information? How do they compare? How do they get there information? Has there been any research done that tries to determine which one provides better traffic information?
I know this is a broad question, but any answer pointing me to a research paper, article or anything will be appreciated.
And is there maybe an alternative that's even better then the two mentioned above, that provide traffic in Denmark?
Both platforms have reasonable traffic data in Denmark. Bing Maps does provide some API's traffic, primarily a tile layer with color coded roads based on the flow of traffic, and a REST service which provides incidents such as constructions, road closures or accidents.
If you want the raw flow numbers or car count type information, neither platform provides this.
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.
I'm working on an idea for a service that uses geocoded data (lat/lng) form a US address. Google maps API v3 has been awesome, until I read the terms of service and acceptable uses a little closer. The problem is that the terms seem to prohibit use of the maps API for any commercial use where the site is not freely accessibly to the public, such as a subscription based service. The alternative offered is Google Maps API Premier, but at $10,000 per year minimum, it's just not possible at this time.
Same goes for services offered by Yahoo! and MS - initial fees are small for enterprises, but for a very early stage startup (not even a finished prototype yet!) it's just not doable.
Geocoding process needs to be real-time and volume would be very small - user would enter address at setup time and only update it if needed.
Any help is greatly appreciated!
I've used geocoder.us for a few projects. They do require sign up for a commercial license, on the upside it only costs $50 per 20,000 lookups. I haven't used their commercial services though to know how reliable they are, but during startup and especially because there will primarily only be one lookup per user from what you say, this seems like a safe bet.
The software company I work for (Safe Software) has incorporated a geocoding service into our product (FME). The service is pxpoint from Proxix. I hear good things, so perhaps it's worth checking them out?
WorldWeatherOnline offers a geocoding API as part of their weather forecast service. The accuracy isn't great though. In some parts of my country, I'm getting bogus results. Their support has not been helpful in this matter.
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).