UK Crime Mapping March 2010 update includes API

UK Crime Mapping  March 2010 update includes API
+Reverse Geocoder "Nearest Police Station" 
+ Geocode Policing Team "Policing team that covers a given point"

Viewing the maps is now more useful with thematic classification including  Burglary, Robbery, Vehicle Crime, Violence, Anti-social behaviour.

Example shown above:

http://maps.police.uk/view/?ll=51.846383529034924,-2.13066101074218&z=10

There is now an Police API  note: an API key is required

The Police API allows you to retrieve information about neighbourhood areas in all 43 English & Welsh police forces. All forces are required to keep this data accurate and up to date, so the API provides a rich and definitive data source for information such as:

• Neighbourhood team members
• Upcoming events
• Crime levels & statistics
• Nearest police stations

"The API is implemented as a standard XML REST web service using HTTP GET/POST requests.

Code examples are provided, but you may need to tailor these to your language of choice. There are plenty of articles on how to make cURL requests with PHP, .NET, Python and others."

More information API 

http://policeapi.rkh.co.uk/

Here is an example request:

http://policeapi.rkh.co.uk/snippets/?q=woodstock

API Authentication http://policeapi.rkh.co.uk/authentication/

XML request and response - http://policeapi.rkh.co.uk/hello-world/

Nearest Police Station (Reverse Geocoder)
"Return a list of the nearest police stations from a text search query."
Search string, can be one of many things:

• Village/town/place name, e.g. Syston, Leicester
• Postcode, e.g. SW1H 0BG
• Latitude & Longitude, e.g. 51.487797,-0.234833

<police-api>
02        <request>
03            <key>{api_key}</key>
04            <function>nearest-police-station</function>
05            <parameters>
06                <q>hyde park, london</q>
07            </parameters>
08        </request>
09        <response>
10            <centre-point>
11                <latitude>51.503263</latitude>
12                <longitude>-0.150975</longitude>
13            </centre-point>
14            <stations>
15                <station>
16                    <distance>1.26</distance>
17                    <force-id>city-of-london</force-id>
18                    <name>Snowhill</name>
19                    <address></address>
20                    <postcode></postcode>

http://policeapi.rkh.co.uk/nearest-police-station/

Geocode a policing team

Return the policing team that covers a given point location:

1    <police-api>
02        <request>
03            <key>{api_key}</key>
04            <function>geocode-team</function>
05            <parameters>
06                <q>stonehenge</q>
07            </parameters>
08        </request>
09        <response>
10            <centre-point>
11                <latitude>51.179025024176</latitude>
12                <longitude>-1.8274748325348</longitude>
13            </centre-point>
14            <team>
15                <force-id>wiltshire</force-id>
16                <team-id>EM11</team-id>
17            </team>
18        </response>
19        <error></error>
20    </police-api>

http://policeapi.rkh.co.uk/geocode-crime-area/

Official Google Maps API Reverse Geocoder - New!

Official Google Maps API Reverse Geocoder - New!

What is Reverse Geocoding? "finding an associated textual location such as a street address, from geographic coordinates."
source:wiki:geocoding


Clicking the map sends the latitude and longitude to the 'Google Geocoder Servers' the nearest address is returned. (click the image above to view the new official example)

Finally after many months of asking Google Map API Team have released the Google Reverse Geocoder :)

There is also a HTTP Server Reverse Geocoder - it works like this
send request:
http://maps.google.com/maps/geo?output=xml&oe=utf-8&ll=37,-122&key=asdad
Reply is:

http://googlegeodevelopers.blogspot.com/2008/10/geocoding-in-reverse.html

Support Documentation is coming very soon.

Supported Countries:

IF this spreadsheet has a 'Yes' in the Geocoding column then that country is supported with Reverse Geocoding as well.


"Note: that GClientGeocoder should be used for any user-entered reverse
geocodes, due to the way our [Google] IP limit system works. The HTTP service
should be used for tasks like reverse geocoding points in a database."

Well done to the Google Maps API Team on working on this and providing some good feedback.

Virtual Earth (6.2) Reverse Geocoder

Virtual Earth (6.2) Reverse Geocoder

"Geocoding is the process of finding associated geographic coordinates (often expressed as latitude and longitude) from other geographic data, such as street addresses, or zip codes. With geographic coordinates the features can be mapped and entered into Geographic Information Systems, or the coordinates can be embedded into media such as digital photographs via geotagging."

"Reverse Geocoding is the opposite: finding an associated textual location such as a street address, from geographic coordinates."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geocoding

Clicking on the map near roads sends a request to get the address by location (street number, street name,postcode/zipcode & country). In the screenshot a click was made halfway along 'Downing Street' response was 10 Downing Street, SW1A 2, UK.

Virtual Earth has been updated and there is lots of advances and new features this is just one working example that can be implemented in a few lines of code.

To see this working as it should:

http://mapperz.googlepages.com/Virtual_Earth_62_Reverse_Geocoder.html

It will work for any location in the World that is covered by Roads on the Virtual Earth Platform

For more official information please vist

http://blogs.msdn.com/virtualearth/archive/2008/09/24/announcing-the-virtual-earth-web-service-and-virtual-earth-map-control-6-2.aspx

New Virtual Earth API Release - Virtual Earth 6.1

UK Live Maps users get back Live Maps! (not Multimap)

"But a couple of unfortunate bugs caused the redirect to not go as planned! One issue was that the MultiMap site was supposed to have prominent links back to Live Maps so that visitors could easily get back if they wanted. Also, web surfers who specifically entered maps.live.com in their browser should not have been redirected at all; only the links from the MSN homepage and other places should have been redirecting to Multimap. But the redirection bug caused all requests for Maps.live.com to redirect to Multimap and was compounded by the fact that there was no link to get back to Live maps. Ugh. it was an ugly situation indeed"

http://virtualearth.spaces.live.com/Blog/cns!2BBC66E99FDCDB98!14442.entry

Video VE 6.1 using 3D VE Plugin showing BirdsEye View with IE8 (not IE7 emulated) .




UK Users visting Live Maps - get Multimap and are getting annoyed!

Live Maps UK re-directs to Multimap now (annoying UK Users)
http://maps.live.co.uk/

Here is the solution (work-around)
http://maps.live.com/?mkt=en-us



update2 - Found some more 'New' Features...

Export to KML, GPX or GeoRSS



* Lots of back end improvements (seems much snappier, right off the bat)
* Safari and IE8 compatibility ( Mapperz tested and works)
* Map Control update to version 6.1 (for developers
* Export your Collection to your Nav/GPS device (nice!)
* Improved "version 2" cities (Las Vegas, Dallas, Denver, Phoenix , more tocome)
* 3D modeling with 3DVIA (much improved)
* Labels for Bird's Eye imagery (looks good in London)
* 1-Click Directions improvements
* MapCruncher Integration (add layers of information from within Live Maps)
* "GeoWeb" tagging and collections enhancements
* Neighborhood Subscribe via GeoRSS
* Tour Enhancements including Hi-Def Movies
* Directions and Traffic Enhancements
* Improved KML display including Google MyMaps links



update1 'A quick VE 6.1 mashup'

Birdeye View now has labels and roads as an option.
try it here

New Virtual Earth API Release - Virtual Earth 6.1




"You thought our photo-texturing was good before? Check it out now Yes, those are trees!"

Microsoft have launched a new version of the Virtual Earth API.
The release has a host of new features and takes advantage of some of the capabilities on Live Search Maps.

Here is the list of new features:

Immersive Imagery
Virtual Earth is an industry leader in providing precise views of the world through bird’s eye1 view and panning, and improved 3D model accuracy and resolution, among other features. Precise imagery creates immersive end-user experiences that bring location-based information to life.
More Detailed 3D Experiences: With this latest release, the map detail for Las Vegas, NV; Phoenix, AZ; Dallas, TX; and Denver, CO features improvements in 3D model accuracy and resolution detail to reveal more buildings, small terrain features, building textures, and trees that enhance overall realism. This enhanced 3D map detail will soon roll out to the more than 250 cities where 3D models are currently available.

Image enhancements
Tailored 3D Tours. Media producers can customize video output of 3D fly though tours in six resolutions, in 15 or 30 frames per second, and can add photos and hide or display pushpin icons.
Bird’s Eye View in 3D. Users can easily toggle bird’s eye view on and off for a seamless end-user experience.
Bird’s Eye Hybrid View. Customers can now select a new map style called Bird’s Eye Hybrid that adds street names to the bird’s eye maps to provide end users better visual context and orientation.

Enhanced Location Functionality

This latest release of Virtual Earth provides organizations with a host of new features that deliver directions—in more languages—to get users where they’re going faster. With enhanced tools that provide greater flexibility and control over the development of location solutions, organizations can continue to update and enhance their online experience to help them remain competitive and provide satisfying end-user experiences.

New Walking Directions. When traveling on foot, users in North America and the European Union can now find the most direct route to walk to their destination, ignoring one-way streets, medians, and other detours that pertain to motor vehicles.

New Traffic-based Routing. Want to take the frontage road and avoid the highway at rush hour? Users can now choose alternate routes based on current traffic flows to get where they’re going faster.

New Reverse Geocoding. Users in the U.S. can now find the closest street address based only on latitude and longitude coordinates from a GPS or other geospatial device.

Improved Localized Directions. Organizations can now provide users with localized driving or walking directions in 15 languages, including English, French, Spanish, German, Portuguese, and Italian, among others.

New Locales. The Virtual Earth dashboard, or navcontrol, is localized to support languages including English for U.S.-based speakers, Japanese, Italian, Spanish for U.S.-based speakers, as well as French for both France and Canada-based speakers.

Enhanced Infrastructure
he Virtual Earth platform is designed for the enterprise user, from features to support. This 6.1 release enhances the platform infrastructure with new cross-browser support to reach more users. The Interactive SDK is available now to demonstrate the latest features and functionality.

Safari Support. The new map control includes improved support for Apple Safari 2 and new support for Safari 3, enabling Mac users to enjoy many of the features of Virtual Earth that are available on Internet Explorer®.

Improved Printing Support. Printing support for maps is enhanced to print the driving route in relation to the map. Printing support is also expanded for cross-browser support of Internet Explorer 6 and 7, Firefox 2 for PC, and Safari 2 and 3 for Mac only.

Updated Interactive SDK. Customers can now access the new Virtual Earth Interactive SDK for online viewing or via download, to demonstrate the new functionality of the Virtual Earth map control.

In addition to the new features they have fixed over 100 "bugs!"

Official Source:
http://blogs.msdn.com/virtualearth/archive/2008/04/11/new-virtual-earth-api-release-virtual-earth-6-1.aspx

Sam Knows Broadband - New Mapping Engine

Sam Knows Broadband - New Mapping Engine

Sam Knows is one of the best independent sites for finding broadband (Phone or Cable) in the United Kingdom. Now their Mapping Application is even easier use.

The 'Old' Mapping required both Telephone (BT) Number and Postcode to find out broadband availability. Now you do not need these.


Reverse Geocoding aids the location search for broadband services in any area of the UK.
Purple Transparent Polygon shows the approximate area of broadband coverage for a BT Exchange.
Try it out here:
http://www.samknows.com/broadband/mapping/mapping.php

The mapping system is designed to be as easy to use as possible. If you just want to browse around your area to see what telephone exchanges are nearby and what services they provide, then simply enter the name of your area in the search box and click Search. You can then zoom in, zoom out or move around the map (by clicking and dragging with your mouse).

Exchanges will appear as blue buildings on the map and will appear dynamically as you move around. You can click on any exchange to see a summary of the wholesale services at the exchange (e.g. the ADSL, SDSL, LLU and cable services in the area).

The Map 'Side Panel' records and shows you more information on the exchange and shows a list of broadband providers with a good approximate maximum speed of broadband for that location

If you're looking to move home or are just interested in your own area, then the mapping system has something for you too. Click on any road or place on the map to receive useful information including the connected telephone exchange and the distance from it in metres. There's also an option here to perform a broadband availability check.

The new mapping engine makes extensive use of the existing database we have and couples it closely with the Google Maps API, which provides the postcode and address lookup functionality. A special thank you goes to Nico for his Reverse Geocoder addon for the Google Maps API (Click here for more).
Mapperz update - Nico has version 1.0.5 out now:
http://nicogoeminne.googlepages.com/full5.html
"I added a helper function to search the resulting placemark for a certain property."

The availability checks offer a significant improvement over the existing postcode-level checks in use by sam knows and others. These new checks are premise-level for all ADSL based services and Virgin Media's cable services. The estimated speed for ADSL broadband services is derived directly from BT Wholesale's checker systems. Note that the ADSL2+ speed estimates are derived from the distance from the exchange and the ADSL speed attainable, correlated against the Internode graph

The exchange coverage polygons are derived from known postcodes served by the exchanges (captured from historical checks performed on the existing availability checker). Sampling well over a million such records and combining it the data with Google's geocoding engine has enabled us to produce the polygons. Note that these are likely to be erroneous in some instances, primarily due to a postcode being incorrectly tagged to an exchange. Such errors will be cleared up over time.

Samknows.com is dedicated to tracking the roll-out and progress of broadband across the UK. It was created by Sam Crawford, and is also maintained by Paul Buck and Ian Saunders.

"The site was started as a small hobbyist site after I worked at Datasouth UK on the Hampshire Broadband project. I left there in September 2003 to study for a BSc Hons in Computer Science at the University of Bath. Four years on and I have now graduated with a first-class degree, and will be returning to Canary Wharf this autumn to work as a developer of mobile computing applications."

Well done Sam and the Team.
Nico Reverse Geocoder was blog about here first.
http://mapperz.blogspot.com/2007/08/exclusive-reverse-geocoding-using.html
http://mapperz.blogspot.com/2007/11/google-reverse-geocoder-update.html
Nice to see that it is getting used in full.

Google Reverse Geocoder Update

Google Reverse Geocoder Update New! v1.0.2

Reverse Geocoding is the inverse relationship where each geographical coordinate is mapped to the nearest known address. Currently this feature is not directly supported by the Google Map API. But can be done by Nico's Reverse Geocoder for Google Maps API using Google's Directions functionality.

Based on the Original Post by Mapperz

Nico has been keen to add some more useful functionality to the Reverse Geocoder.



Pan and Zoom click your location and the address and country code is shown.

What is New?

• all supported countries

• house number support (experimental)

Test Country support here
http://nicogoeminne.googlepages.com/full2.html

Available Counties:

Country	GClientGeocoder	GDirections	GReverseGeocoder
Austria	x	x	p
Australia	x	x	p
Belgium	x	x	x
Brazil	x	x	x
Canada	x	x	p
The Czech Republic	x	x	p
Denmark	x	x	p
Finland	x	x	p
France	x	x	x
Germany	x	x	x
Hong Kong	x	n	n
Hungary	x	x	p
India	x	n	n
Ireland	x	x	p
Italy	x	x	x
Japan	x	n	n
Luxembourg	x	x	x
The Netherlands	x	x	x
New Zealand	x	x	x
Norway	x	x	p
Poland	x	x	p
Portugal	x	x	p
Singapore	x	x	p
Spain	x	x	p
Sweden	x	x	p
Switzerland	x	x	p
Taiwan	x	n	n
Thailand	x	x	p
United Kingdom	x	x	x
United States	x	x	x

(x=available, n=not available, p=probably available but not tested)

Experimental House Number Support

Since v1.0.2. Once the Reverse geocoder is set up experimental house number support is enabled by calling the setExperimentalHouseNumber method as shown in the example.

reversegeocoder.setExperimentalHouseNumber(true);

Important note:
THIS FEATURE IS EXPERIMENTAL AND USES MULTIPLE
GClientGeocoder AND GDirections
REQUESTS WHICH COULD EXCESS THE GOOGLE REQUEST LIMITS.
That's exactly why it is disabled (uncommented) in the full example.
Use it on own risk.

Exclusive - Reverse Geocoding using Google Maps API only!

Exclusive - ALL New! Reverse Geocoding using Google Maps API only!

Google Maps is great! and the programmers that take the API and do find and create useful applications. Like this Reverse Geocoding

What is reverse geocoding?
"The conversion of latitude and longitude coordinate data of locations into descriptive addresses"



Try it out here
http://nicogoeminne.googlepages.com/reversegeocode.html

Thanks to Nico Goeminne for finding this algorithm and giving Mapperz the chance to suggest and give exclusive feedback on this incredible function.

Is this legal? - Yes, We have had this confirmed by Pamela Fox (Google Maps API Team) that this is not breaking the Terms of Use - which is great news.

"I checked with a product manager and he looked through our licensing
agreements. The conclusion is that as long as you're not using the
reverse geocoder for real-time tracking of any kind, then you're okay
to use it."

Please use it - suggest comments, feedback always welcome.

Nico's idea came from this
"Google Maps is great! One day I was working on a treasure hunting game, it combined both real world as virtual items placed in and around the very nice city of Ghent (Belgium). At regular times I told them the location (GPS) of an item, so they could go out hunt. Some of them complained because they didn't have a GPS and couldn't find an online tool to convert the GPS coordinates to an address. "No problem I said, I'll fix one up", at that time I did not cross my mind that GM couldn't reverse geocode since before all things I ever needed were just there in that great API. So I was kinda disappointed when I read trough the documentation and even more when I searched the net on the subject. So in the end, I decided to give a try myself and see if I could figure out something and then I stroke me : The GM API has reverse geocoding capabilities. They just call it Driving Directions! Google Maps is great! "

Thanks and all credit to Nico - Excellent Job!

Mapperz Tests a UK version of this method (demo)

Ask City Maps Supports Reverse Geocoding

Using Ask City now supports reverse geocoding... and supports UK Addresses.

Clicking on the Map or Aerial Photo with the yellow icon will submit a request to find the address and returns the results in a ballon.

Searching an Address

Result

Well done Ask