View Single Post
Posts: 1,548 | Thanked: 7,510 times | Joined on Apr 2010 @ Czech Republic
#561
Base on modRana user feedback I recently got an idea (or possibly even RFE) - would it make sense if the OSM Scout Server Location search API could also parse geographic coordinates ?

The general uses case is users with a geographic coordinate pair string they have copy pasted from another app or read and typed from paper and want to show it on the map and possibly do other app specific things with it (save to a POI database, use it as target for routing, etc.)

The API already does NLP based address parsing so I guess also checking if the query contains coordinates would be possible. For example, something like:

49.2, 16.616667
geo:49.2, 16.616667
49°12′0″ N, 16°37′0″ E
UTM: 5450947 617771 33U

If it matches such a format a single POI with the given coordinates would be returned. I guess an actual POI search should be done as well by default even if the query matches a coordinate pair - there could be places called after geographic coordinates.

This feature could be also combined by the POI type (I'm sorry that regular POI type support in modRana is taking so long :P) to tell OSM Scout Server with a special POI type ("coordinate_entry" ?) to only parse the query for coordinates, so applications could implement coordinate-search/entry/matching-only-views that would never trigger regular POI searches.

Having this done by OSM Scout Server would have the benefit of shared code that can be used by all applications that query the OSM Scout Server API instead of every application implementing this separately & differently. It also makes the API more similar to online POI search engines that usually can search for coordinates.

So, does this sound sane/useful ? Also, I would not be surprised if there already were some libraries from parsing coordinates from plain text like there is libpostal for address parsing.
__________________
modRana: a flexible GPS navigation system
Mieru: a flexible manga and comic book reader
Universal Components - a solution for native looking yet component set independent QML appliactions (QtQuick Controls 2 & Silica supported as backends)
 

The Following 7 Users Say Thank You to MartinK For This Useful Post: