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
Related
Google Maps does an excellent job of using polygons to represent areas wherever possible, particularly from the search bar:
But in some cases (navigation) a point geometry is required, no matter how vague or large-scale the area being searched, and this can result in some funny-at-best, completely-wrong-at-worst locations:
There are two ways that I know of that are widely used to generalize a polygon to a point:
Calculate the geometric centroid (there are various ways to do this but they'll all produce similar results)
Choose an point of administrative importance (i.e. navigating to "New York, NY" takes you to city hall)
In some cases Google appears to do neither of these things, and I can't figure out how the point was chosen. Specifically, navigating to "Vermont" directs you to a field on the outskirts of a village in the Northern part of the state, far from any examples of 1. or 2. above.
What other method could Google be using in cases like this?
I've received information from side channels that this is a quirk of Google's geographic features algorithm. Many thanks for the suggestions, but this one appears to be less of a mysterious puzzle and more of a transient bug.
I'm trying to build a map with the following algorithm:
Wait for pan or zoom to occurs.
Query for all streets visible in the viewport (extent).
Color every visible street with a predefined color.
Example:
I want to show the numbers of businesses on each street, or the number of crimes committed at each street.
I have a DB which holds this kind of information (streetname, data), but each row doesn't have the location data.
Therefore, after each map zoom or pan, I cannot query all of it by a geographical bounding rectangle, it will be far more efficient to use Google own DB and query it by street names.
I know how to register to pan and zoom events.
I know how to calculate the viewport coordinates.
I know how to color a single street.
How can I get a list of all streets visible in the viewport?
Any other solutions or architectures are welcome.
The preferred solution will not use Google DirectionsService nor DirectionsRenderer since they slow down the map.
My understanding is that what you are asking is not possible from Google API's. Reverse geocoding inside a polygon is not a service they offer. There are some posts on other sites (e.g. https://gis.stackexchange.com/questions/22816/how-to-reverse-geocode-without-google) with the reference gisgraphy.com looking like a pretty neat reverse geocoding tool.
This still does not address your all streets in a polygon problem however. I think your only option would be to get your hands on the data (Open Street Maps) and write the code yourself. Further - if you are going to do this for a large area I would take an approach like I recommended here with grids: https://stackoverflow.com/a/18420564/1803682
I would create my grid elements, and for each street calculate all the grids to which it belongs and store in the database. Then when you search a polygon, you would calculate all the grids the polygon overlaps, and can then test the subset of road data in each of those squares to determine overlap.
I looked into this and abandoned a similar requirement a few months back and still have a desire to implement it. Most of the point/line in polygon work is happening on data created in my application (i.e. not street data) and right now that is the only data I will be including. What I am trying to say is - I hope someone gives you a better answer.
Update:
For what you are asking I still believe you will need to use a mix of your own database based on OpenStreetMap and some kind of grid analysis carried out in advance. If you have some time to commit to the project this should not be too awful to process. The database will be large, and the calculations needed will likely require a significant amount of one-time / upfront processing time. As far as highlighting routes/roads/whatever within the viewport, there are lots of way to accomplish this using the API - example here which I found useful: polyline snap to road using google maps api v3
Also useful: http://econym.org.uk/gmap/snap.htm
Note that one way streets may give some grief if using the directions api to snap to a street and you will likely have to watch for this and correct or reverse the start/end points.
Google would recommend using it's Geocoding Service in order to populate your data base with the co-ordinates. You can then use the LatLng Bounds Class method "contains" to check whether your points lie within the viewport. The advantage of this approach is you only need to geocode the information once and then store this, versus sending coding requests each time the viewport changes.
An alternate efficient way of displaying this kind of data may be to use google fusion tables. this greatly simplifies the integration of the data with the map.
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.)
If I had lat/long data for all our leads in Salesforce, is there a way to write a query to group them, or say list all the leads within 10 miles of San Francisco, CA ?
[EDIT: Clarification]
I have thousands of leads with both a full address, and long/lats.
I want to build a query on these leads that will give me all of the leads near San Francisco, CA. This means doing GIS type work within salesforce.
I could of course filter specifically on city, or zipcodes or area code, but this presents some problems when trying to rollup a whole metro area.
Yes. You need to Reverse GeoCode them with a tool/service. In the past I have used Maporamas service but it was quite expensive and that was before Google maps and virtual earth existed so I am sure there is something cheaper(free) out there now.... Googling around I have found this and this
EDIT:
OK from What I understand you are trying to calculate the distance between 2 lat/long points. I would start by discounting the ones that where outside you sphere of (lets say) 10 miles. So from your central point you will want to get the the coordinates 10 miles, East, West, South and North. To do this you need to use the Great-circle distance formula.
From that point you have you Sales Force Data if you wish to break this data up further then you need to order the points by distance from the central point. To do this you need to use the Haversine formula
I am not sure what you language preference is so I just included some examples from SQL(mainly) and C#
Haversine Formula in C# and in SQL
Determine the distance between ZIP codes using C#
Great Circle SQL
Great Circle 2
Use GeoHash.org (either as a web service or implement the algorithm). It hashes your lat-long coords into a form that appears similar for nearby places. For example A may have a hash like "akusDf3af" and B might have a hash like "akusDf3b2" if they are nearby. Then do a SOQL query that looks for places starting with the same n characters as a known location. Your n will determine the radius of the lookup.
These are some great technical solutions that can provide very exact answers, but two things to consider:
geospatial proximity does not map neatly to responsibility
Ownership calculation seems to be done best through postal code lookups or other rules that don't allow for gaps or overlaps. Otherwise, you'll have two (or more) salespeople fighting over leads that are close to both of them, and ignore those leads that are far away from both of them.
So, if you're using geo-calculations like those above to assign ownership, just acknowledge the system will leak and create business rules to accomodate for that. But a simple postal lookup to define territories (as salesforce's own territory management feature does) might be better.
I'd suggest the problem we're trying to solve geospatially is not who owns which lead. Rather, given all the leads you own, which are nearby?
maps often offer more data per pixel than columnar reports
Again, geospatial data in a report may not be the best answer. A lead 50km away, but along a major road, is more interesting than another lead 50km away on the other side of a mountain or lake. Or a lead close to other leads is more interesting than a lead by itself.
A report can't show this, but a map can.
Salesforce has some great examples of Google Maps integrations. Instead of a columnar report called "My Nearby Leads", why not a visualforce page, with a google map inside? You're giving the user far more information than a columnar report could. They might like it better, and it's easier to implement than trying to calculate some of the equations above.
Just another perspective that may (or may not) be appropriate to the problem at hand.
This post is really old, but is showing up at the top of Google results, so I figured I would post some info to it anyways.
2 nice mapping tools are batchgeo.com and geocod.io. Geocod.io can even give you lat and long coordinates from an address.
If you just need a one time calculation, you can use Excel. Export all your leads with the lat and long. Then go to Google Maps and get the lat and long in decimal degrees for the city center of wherever you want to measure to.
Then use this formula in excel to calculate the distance between the coordinates in miles. Lat1dd and Long1dd are the coordinates for one point, and the lat2dd and long2dd are coordinate points for the other point.
=3963*ACOS(COS(RADIANS(90-lat1dd))*COS(RADIANS(90-lat2dd))+SIN(RADIANS(90-lat1dd))*SIN(RADIANS(90-lat2dd))*COS(RADIANS(long1dd-long2dd)))
After you run it, just sort the results from smallest to largest to get those results that are the closest.
I haven't done this next part yet, but conceptually it should work. We have a field that lists the major market each account is in. Example, Chicago IL. I am going to build a trigger or formula field that essentially says IF(Market="Chicago IL") then use X and Y for the lat and long. These will be hardcoded as the city center for that specific market. The query will then run each individual account's lat and long against the one from the city center to calculate a distance.
If you wanted to break the market into different zones, you could adjust your formula so it uses < and > on the lat and long fields. Everything less than X but greater than Y goes in Zone A, etc.
Hope this helps someone.