[mapserver-users] zoom to place by name

[pcreso at pcreso.com]

Provided your use complies with the terms of the Google terms of use, you could probably develop an app based on the public Google API.

I figure your proposal essentially involves two steps: 
 develop a public database of placenames & extents 
 provide a service enabling the easy reuse of these data for zooming functionality


Note that Google solutions are somewhat arbitrary, so that Chinese placenames in Tibet (for example) do not exist in the Indian Google service, and vice versa for the Chinese Google service. Similar local variations occur elsewhere, so while Google does have a global dataset, it is not implemented as such, but as local variants. This is needed to comply with legislative requirements in different countries.

An "open global" solution that did not support these political idiosyncrasies would be illegal to use in some countries. 

Brent Wood


--- On Tue, 1/31/12, Mr. Puneet Kishor <punk.kish at gmail.com> wrote:

From: Mr. Puneet Kishor <punk.kish at gmail.com>
Subject: [mapserver-users] zoom to place by name
To: mapserver-users at lists.osgeo.org
Date: Tuesday, January 31, 2012, 4:14 PM

a'ite, this question is neither mapserver-specific nor OL-specific (two technologies that I am using gung-ho right now), but both would be involved in developing something that I describe below --

you know, how in Google Maps you can type pretty much any location's name, and if it finds a match in its database, Google Maps zooms to the boundary of that location. For example, if I type 

    http://maps.google.com/maps?q=Zurich,+Switzerland

or 

    http://maps.google.com/maps?q=Dane+County,+WI

or 

    http://maps.google.com/maps?q=New+York+City

the map zooms to the bounds of that location. This is what I want to develop, for the entire world. I guess the starting point would be the geonomes database, except, if I understand correctly, geonames does not have the bounds of locations. Instead, it has only the centroids of locations.

A better way might be something like the following --

I am using Google Maps as my base layer anyway. Could I somehow submit a search through my application to the Google Maps base layer, return the bounds and zoom to that?

Thoughts? Suggestions?

--
Puneet Kishor_______________________________________________
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