Ben Dowling - Geomium - Building a Geo App - Geomob Feb 2011
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This document discusses services, data, and architectures for building a geo application. It describes getting a user's location, searching for locations, and different types of content that can be displayed on a map like places, pictures, events, deals, and people. The document recommends combining multiple data sources and handling duplicates. It also discusses using user generated content and how a server enables more possibilities like background processing and collecting statistics.
Ben Dowling - Geomium - Building a Geo App - Geomob Feb 2011
- 1. Services, Data and Architectures for Building a Geo App Ben Dowling – Geomium 10th February 2011 – GeoMob London
- 2. Building a simple Geo App ● Lets show interesting content on a map ● Where? ● At the user's location ● Allow the user to search for a location ● What? ● Geo-enabled APIs ● User Generated Content
- 3. Getting the user's location ● Most smartphones have built in GPS now ● Determine location based on a mix of GPS, WiFi (SkyHook) and Cell tower triangulation ● Will give you the user's latitude and longitude ● Reverse Geocoder to convert to a place name ● 51.5111,-0.1222 → 5 Southampton Street, London
- 4. Searching for a location ● Requires Geocoding ● eg. “London” → 51.499,-0.126 ● Android has support for Google's service ● iPhone doesn't – you can use Google's API ● Alternatives: ● Flickr: gives you nearest city ● Yahoo: provides WOEIDs
- 5. Content ● Pull content directly off the web ● Lots of different content is available via APIs that support search by latitude and longitude ● Such as...
- 6. Places ● Facebook Places ● Requires the user to login ● FourSquare ● Low rate limit ● Gowalla ● Limited descriptions ● Google Places ● Currently in beta for selected partners ● Yelp ● Can't show reviews on mobile
- 7. Pictures ● Flickr ● Lots of advanced search options ● Panoramio ● Displayed on Google Maps. Takes a bounding box ● PicPlz ● Includes coordinates of photos, but you can't filter by it
- 8. Events ● Meetup ● Upcoming ● XML only! ● Amiando ● XML only! ● Eventful ● Free for non-commercial use ● Last.fm ● Non-commercial use only
- 9. Deals ● Bview ● Good UK coverage. Not many mobile deals ● Groupon ● Only a few deals per city ● The Deal Map ● Mostly US based
- 10. People ● FourSquare ● Gowalla ● Facebook ● Twitter
- 11. Multiple data sources ● More data by combining multiple sources ● Handling duplicates ● Detection ● Merge data ● Latency
- 12. User generated content ● Have your users generate content! ● Could just be their location (eg. Friend finder app) ● Unique content (eg. Photos) ● Annotate existing content (eg. Review a place) ● Need a server to store it on
- 13. More possibilities with a server ● Single request from the mobile ● Background processing ● Can do duplication detection and merging on the server ● Add new data without changing your app ● Collect statistics
- 14. Thank you! ben@geomium.com @coderholic