[Mapserver-users] Geocoder finally released for developer purusal

[Eric Waters]

Mappers alike,

I mentioned on this list last week (and actually like a year ago) of
some work I've been doing in an open source geocoder based on TIGER/Line
data.  I've finally put this work into CVS and on the website
http://gis.vegcrew.net/ giving it a name of VegGIS (I'm doing it to help
promote vegetarianism).

Anyway, I'm not sure if what I'm doing is actually what other people
need, but it's there for you all to take a look at and decide for
yourself.  You can test the geocoder quickly at
http://joxer.vegcrew.net/test.pl, or you can download the code and run
it yourself.

Notes:

  The tgr2shp functionality is limited to those layers that would be
  needed to draw maps similar in function to MapQuest.

  The geocoder is kinda fast I think, but could be a lot better.  I'd
  like to borrow from the "Google Contest" work at
  http://dan.egnor.name/google.html, which is also a GPLed geocoder
  based on TIGER/Line data.

  The router sucks, as it uses the Dijkstra algorithm and takes 30min on
  a pretty fast G4 to find the shortest path between two points
  (advantage is that finding the shortest path between that *same* point
  and any others takes miliseconds after the inital work).

Anyway, should we create a mailing list to talk about this?  Anyone want
to join as a developer?  Is this something people are interested in?

Since this is not directly related to mapserver (although mapserver is
an integral part for me in this project), I'll refrain from
further posts on this topic.

Eric Waters