Should people type in their town or select from a list? What's possible and available?

What should users of WSF2008 be able to do to list themselves and their event on a map? What can be pre-filled? Do we want people to type in countries? Province-level geopolitical entities? Villages? What can the Google Maps API take, and from where? How can we try to ensure it fails gracefully, and falls back to the closest approximation of the location it can find.

Right now the plan is to do what location module lets us, but I don't know if this has been tested worldwide.

From a Skype conversation:

users are visilbe in the map?
7:26 PM
i thouhg only pages connections and activities were visible in the map...
Benjamin Melançon 7:26 PM
Yes. Probably as a separate map.
Pierre George 7:26 PM
pages)=portals
7:27 PM
so there would be clusters of people in the "cities"
Benjamin Melançon 7:27 PM
If there are problems with this, we don't have to. I suppose there might be privacy issues.
7:27 PM
If you can zoom in to exact address.
Pierre George 7:28 PM
i mea do we use the same data as the GM participants directory should not be a problem - the city might be a compulsory field though
7:28 PM
nobody willcare or give his persoanl adress i suppose
Benjamin Melançon 7:29 PM
There are still issues to research regarding map generation for non-industrialized countries that I have to research.
Pierre George 7:31 PM
may be list of " big" cities could be provided for people to choose from in their country , as an alternative to finding by themselves ...
7:31 PM
you are using google map if i undestand ...
Benjamin Melançon 7:32 PM
that's the plan. Do you have experience with Google in Africa etc.?
Pierre George 7:32 PM
i have tried to localize in nairobi and mali saw the scale was much bigger....
7:33 PM
but if we limit ourselves to a certain scale that might be enough and let people select a point graphically if they insist on not selecting a "city from a standard list
7:34 PM
if the city name is not in the "known " list of cities of the coutnry - or if google does not find the city ( as a second option) then people have ot place the point on the map by themselves
7:35 PM
with a proximity control about the portal they will use - if there is a portal located less than xxx kms from them they should not create anoter local page
7:36 PM
soemthing like this ...?!
7:36 PM
local page = portal ...
Benjamin Melançon 7:36 PM
Yes.
7:37 PM
That is the plan. (Sorry, was pulled away.)
7:37 PM
How to come up with the list of known city names is still quite an open question.
7:37 PM
(Or whether.)
7:37 PM
If you have a list of all the localities in the world, I'm all ears!
Pierre George 7:38 PM
there are no atlas indexes on line ?
7:39 PM
atlas indexes have thousands of cities listed - (not by country , by alphabetical order !
7:39 PM
i am just checking my old atlas here ...
Benjamin Melançon 7:39 PM
well, nothing that I know of available for free in electronic form that would let people select country, and then city
7:39 PM
with geographical coordinates included
Pierre George 7:40 PM
the scanning and OCR of the pages of this atlas
7:40 PM
each city is given with coordinates...
Benjamin Melançon 7:41 PM
no, OCR on coordinates is not going to work!
Pierre George 7:41 PM
there is a list of the most populated cities of each country
7:42 PM
ex iran :
7:42 PM
about 40 cities
7:42 PM
italy 100 cities
7:42 PM
that might be a good start
Benjamin Melançon 7:42 PM
we need a database, if you can research free electronic versions, that would be fantastic
7:43 PM
I still haven't fully looked into Drupal solutions
7:43 PM
even, though.
7:44 PM
And I suppose we could purchase one, but it would be better to develop something everyone could use
Pierre George 7:45 PM
i understand will take a look ... a little - but scanning a real atlas might be a first realistic solution ( don not know about OCR capacibiliies)
7:46 PM
a real atlas index list i mean - as the one i have in fornt of me
Benjamin Melançon 7:46 PM
The difficulty is not just reading the characters, but having it get in electronic form in a way that a database can take. Anything moves over a column done for
7:47 PM
I have to go shortly, but this was a good talk. I'll be posting notes of it.
Pierre George 7:47 PM
20 pages of A3 format a three column list

Follow-up e-mails:

Re: list of cities

Thanks Pierre,

What we need I don't think will ever be doable by scanning or copy-paste in any reasonable time frame.

To have cities pre-loaded and be useful, we need a database with at least:

Town name | State/Province/etc. | Latitude (numeric) | Longitude (numeric)

Ideally it would be very complete, because both pre-loaded and user-submitted information could be messy. But maybe necessary.

ben

Pierre George wrote:

ben
take a look at this site

16O copy paste i excel and format and this is already a nice file of
world cities ....although not equitative ( 1000 cities for france
60millions and 25 for mali 8 Millions ?
Pierre

http://weather.ca.weatherbug.com

Resolution

Use location.module. Any alternatives or enhancements?

See also: assigning geographical coordinates...