Posts tagged ‘uk postcode’
Google have just announced that their geocoding API will now geocode UK addresses – so should make things much easier for maps developers. Will need to think now as to whether to move to this service for MSG, rather than using the Geonames service – a (possible) reason for moving to the Google API is that it’ll geocode full UK postcodes, whereas Geonames is only accurate to the first half of the postcode.
Have been sent a link (thanks Tom!) to Geonames website which provides a free webservice (or downloadable database) to obtain geocode data for various countries (including the UK). Only downside for some people would be that it only appears to provide data for the first part of a UK postcode (ie LS6 1BT won’t return any results, but just LS6 will). But in our case that’s actually all we need.
Spent the morning having a play around with Google maps as we’re looking to embed maps into the MSG – I’ve got a simple page set up (here) to demo listing contacts – you can then click on the contact to show their location on the map.
However, what we’d really like would be to have would be all contacts shown on the same map (my current example just show one contact at a time). I had a go at doing this with the Google maps API, but all UK addresses seemed to draw a blank – then I found out about the issue of having the lat/long coordinates for UK addresses (some copyright thing! – see all the messages in this forum about it). So it seems (from my current understanding after my brief delve into this stuff this morning) that I’d need to get hold of a geocode database to use with Google maps. Apparently the OU might already have a geocode db I can use – so I’ll need to see if I can track this down and get permission to make use of it.
There are plenty of other options for us I guess including…
Anyway, I shall keep going and see if I can get any further 
