Rails Geocoder MapIt功能的替代品

Question

I'm working with rails, geocoder and gmap4rails. Trying to figure out how to show boundaries of an ward district area in UK. Found mapit - Mapit by mySociaty . Would be amazing if anyone could suggest or point me in the direction for creating a similar functions in rails. I'm especially interested in functions like 'Touching this area' as showed in the mapit.mysociety.org site.

Google maps also show boundaries of an area eg google map example Shows boundaries for 'Roath' area. is there anyway retrieve that data from google ? I also tested a lot of addresses with geocoder, looking up in google. Tried to Geocode from address administrative_area_level_1 2 and 3 as well as in locality or sublocality. The results were very unreliable. Tried at least 20 addresses from birmigham city - only some of them returned administrative_area_level1,2,3 or locality or sublocality and most of the time it was wrong data.

Another website that is sort of showing ward areas with in a city is www.streetlife.com I think it only works for UK users. basically it takes a postcode from a user and then in their map they show users district and other district around it, which is pretty cool :) Does anyone know how it works ? or how to get something like that working in rails ?

I would really love to discuss this topic in more depth and figure out the best answers for it.

Answer 1

This question at gis.stackexchange is probably of use to you if you wish to use rails. The "touching" feature is fundamentally a PostGIS query, so you could build on top of anything that allowed you to make SQL queries to a PostgreSQL database - GeoDjango (on which MapIt is built) makes this nice, but you could certainly accomplish the same in rails with work.

You won't be able to get those boundaries you see out of Google Maps, I believe, as it's proprietary.

Geocoding is a separate topic - you may want to look at things like OpenStreetMap's Nominatim ( MapQuest have a version) or GeoNames , which could supply a dataset you could use with geocoder - Ordnance Survey also publish GB datasets that could be of use.