Automated/batch lookup of longtitude/latitude for city lists?

At 11:51 AM -0800 2006/01/23, Dieder Bylsma wrote:
>Does anybody know of a pre-existing solution for doing an automated lookup
>and annotation of a list of cities/towns for particular countries?


        Tom Owad did this for "Data Mining 101: Finding Subversives
with Amazon Wishlists" <http://www.applefritter.com/bannedbooks>.


                                                Chris Pepper
--
Chris Pepper: <http://www.reppep.com/~pepper/>
Rockefeller University: <http://www.rockefeller.edu/>

> Does anybody know of a pre-existing solution for doing an automated lookup
> and annotation of a list of cities/towns for particular countries?

I *just* this afternoon have been working on this problem. The solution I
came up with was to use Yahoo's geocoding API to translate (via PHP) a list
of city/states into lat/long. Unfortunately, I was unable to find a similar
and free web service for doing the same thing for international locations.

If anyone knows of a service for international locations, please let me know!

Meanwhile, the yahoo conversion for US-based locations that I've been using is:

http://api.local.yahoo.com/MapsService/V1/geocode?appid=YahooDemo&city=Sunnyvale&state=CA

This spits back an XML document with latitude/longitude.

My mass-conversion PHP script is not ready for public consumption, but if
anyone is interested in it in its current state, I'd be happy to email it to
you.

Thanks,

--
David McLaughlin

You can go here <http://www.bcca.org/misc/qiblih/latlong_us.html> and
get the data for pretty much any U.S. city. Shouldn't be too
difficult to put this into an Excel spreadsheet for future lookups.

This page <http://www.astro.com/atlas> actually does a lookup. If you
know any programming language (including scripting languages like
Perl or Python), it shouldn't be too difficult to figure out the
string to send for the GET method used by the web page.

Not too sure exactly what you were looking for.

=======================================
Well, I've wrestled with reality for 35 years, doctor,
and I'm happy to state I finally won out over it."
-- Elwood P. Dowd
=======================================

David Weintraub
davidweintraubworld.net
davidweintraub.name

On 23 Jan 2006, at 22:36 , Chris Pepper wrote:

Tom Owad did this for "Data Mining 101: Finding Subversives with Amazon Wishlists" <http://www.applefritter.com/bannedbooks>.

That is stunning. Impressive. Oh yes, and really really scary!

On 1/25/06 6:29 PM, "Lewis Butler" <gkremegmail.com> wrote:

>  Tom Owad did this for "Data Mining 101: Finding Subversives  with Amazon
> Wishlists" <http://www.applefritter.com/bannedbooks>.   

Not being much interested in coding, all that stuff is so eye-glazing for me that I can't wade through it to find out if there's any proof in the pudding. As far as I see, there isn't.

It seems to be theory over reality, the bane of Modern life.