Hi,
good points Richard! I totally forgot about Nominatim. As a matter of
fact, there's a Geocoding plug-in for Quantum GIS (www.qgis.org)
available using the Nominatim web service. Given that Emily wants to do
stuff with the data beyond spreadsheets, this might be something worth
trying, as Quantum GIS gives you a lot of options for spatial analysis.
It's free and fairly easy to use, if you got some background knowledge
of GIS.
Best,
Alex
--
Dr Alexander von Lünen
Independent Scholar, Leicester, UK
Academia.edu profile <http://independent.academia.edu/AlexandervonLunen>
LinkedIn profile <http://uk.linkedin.com/in/avonlunen>
On 20/11/2013 16:02, Richard Light wrote:
> On 20/11/2013 15:30, Alexander von Lünen wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> you could use the Google Geocoding API:
>> https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/geocoding/
>>
>> This is a Web Service, which returns the coordinates for a place name
>> as JSON or XML. I've seen people using the Google Maps Interface
>> directly from Google Docs as well, i.e. you could list the place
>> names your visitors come from in a spreadsheet and have these place
>> names geocoded from Google Docs and mapped onto Google Maps. I am not
>> a great fan of Google (don't like their terms and conditions) and I
>> use more sophisticated GIS. If you don't like to use Google and are
>> able (or have someone around you being able) to do some basic
>> programming in Perl or Python etc, you could use the GeoNames service
>> (www.geonames.org) to geocode the place names and then map it onto
>> OpenStreetMap (www.openstreetmap.org).
> I agree with your reservations about the Google Maps geocoding API. To
> quote their conditions: "The Geocoding API may only be used in
> conjunction with a Google map; geocoding results without displaying
> them on a map is prohibited."
>
> Which rather rules out storing the results as useful data and
> deploying them in a variety of ways.
>
> Geonames [1] provides a web service with a reasonably friendly XML
> response format; the main problem is that their primary search is for
> a single place keyword, so you get every place in the world with that
> name (though you can apply a country code filter to narrow things
> down). I have been driven to write a program which adds the
> hierarchical aspect to Geonames searches [2]. It's Windows-only, but
> you're welcome to a copy. (You need to register with Geonames - hence
> the 'username' parameters - but it's free.)
>
> OpenStreetMap provides the Nominatim geocoding service [2], which
> returns OSM data including lat/long points.
>
> Richard
>
> [1] e.g.
> http://api.geonames.org/search?style=short&name_equals=Newport&username=xxx&country=GB
> [2] e.g.
> http://light.demon.co.uk/scripts/getplaceurl.exe/?q=Newport,%20Essex&username=xxx
> [3] e.g.
> http://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/search?q=Newport,%20Essex&format=xml&limit=100&countrycodes=gb&addressdetails=1&email=xxx@yyy
>
>>
>> Hope this helps,
>> Alex
>>
>> On 20/11/2013 14:47, Emily Hicks wrote:
>>> Hi All,
>>>
>>> Does anyone know of a good website or method online for mapping
>>> visitors- e.g. I have lots of data from our visitors book about
>>> where people come from, and would like to be able to input it
>>> somehow to create me some useful statistics rather than working out
>>> something on a spreadsheet.
>>>
>>> Many thanks
>>> Emily
>>>
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