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Google Reverse Geocoding
So Google finally released a feature they call Reverse Geocoding. Normal Geocoding means that you can get GPS coordinates back if you feed it a location name. Reverse Geocoding therefore means that you get location names back if you feed it GPS coordinates.
So I thought it was time for some experiments...
The interesting thing is that Geolocation seems to be a problem in Gaborone. It gives me GPS coordinates but does not give me a city name. The region name is South East (which would be correct, relative to Botswana) but the country name is South Africa. The South East of South Africa is definitely quite far from here. Very strange.
However, when I then feed these coordinates into the Reverse Geocoding API, I get some rather interesting results back. Basically I get only one name and that is North West. What? Ok, that would actually be correct relative to South Africa and because the Geolocation API seems to round off the GPS coordinates to two decimal places, I could kind of forgive that.
However, what I don’t understand is why it doesn’t at least add “South Africa" to that text.
Strange... Maybe not entirely usable yet in this area? Any other good or bad experiences from other local developers or even users??
Copyright © 2004-2009 Charl van Niekerk. All articles are released under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 South Africa licence, unless where otherwise stated.
2 Comments
Comment by
Brad Whittington on Wednesday, October 29, 2008 8:41:00 AM
You have been able to do this forever using http://www.geonames.org/ and http://gazetteer.openstreetmap.org/namefinder/
They have APIs to access the information in a non-html form.
Comment by
Charl van Niekerk on Saturday, November 01, 2008 8:04:00 AM
Thanks Brad, will check those out.
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