Geocoding and other countries
Posted at 4:54pm on Wednesday, February 14th, 2007I’ve been muttering previously about geocoding in the UK. It sucks. Everything is under heavy (and expensive) license restrictions and the Open Source alternatives are a long way from getting there. Luckily the latest job we‘re working on is an Australian Google Maps mashup (map my adventure, soft launched last week)…
One of the things that we’ve been asked to do is tie points on the map to the State that they’re in. Doug and I had been worrying about this for some time, as we thought that we would end up manually building polygons to represent state boundaries from a map ourselves. But no. Of course, we live in the UK and think that all map data is sacred. In Australia, and a lot of other countries too, the data is freely available and provided by the Government. You can download it yourselves too if you want.
