Google provides a geocoding API that takes in an address and outputs the corresponding latitude and longitude. However, there are usage limits to using server-side geocoding with a quota of 2,500 requests per IP per day. Google also has a limit for client-side geocoding, but is not a restrictive. It may block requests if all of the users are making requests at the same time. Since our application will have a limited dataset and is still in development, we can incrementally obtain the latitudes and longitudes for all of our address each day. When our application is actually deployed, we can use client-side scripts from Google's API to place markers on the map.
I decided to test the server side method on a portion of the school data I gathered from Great Schools. Since the geocoder required an address, I had to figure out how to pull only the address for each school from the csv file and use that as a parameter for the geocoder html request: Geocoder Request Format: https://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/geocode/output?parameters I spent some time reading and going through the tutorials on their API site to ensure I fully understood how to use the tools that are available. I really wanted to become familiar with their Maps API, because I envision us using this for the application we develop so we can place markers for our found places and use their methods to determine which places are nearby to a selected real-estate property. While going through the tutorials, I found a way to use Google's API to return nearby places to a given address, and allows you to choose the type of places to be shown. This was a really cool find, because maybe we can use that to obtain general places for our map, for example: Libraries, restaurants, etc. I decided that this may be something I can revisit in the future if we have time, since we have already realized our datasets, and I am not sure how if it is possible to use their APIs to make that many requests. Once I was comfortable enough to begin testing their API against our Great Schools data, I started researching how to obtain only the address from the csv file containing all of our school data. I ran into some issues parsing the csv file to obtain a properly formatted address. The CSV file was in the following format: ['Abbotsford School District', 'Abbotsford Elementary School', '510 West Hemlock Street, Abbotsford, WI 54405'] ['Abbotsford School District', 'Abbotsford Middle/Senior High School', '510 West Hemlock Street, Abbotsford, WI 54405'] ... Whenever I would try to return the address I would only receive the address up to the first comma; the City, State and Zip was not returned. The reason this was happening was because I needed to use a comma as a delimiter, because each element was separated by a comma. Somehow, the reader was reading each line as a string, which is why the reader read each line as having five elements vs. three. I guess somewhere in the process of gathering and storing the data from Great Schools cause an issue with the csv generated document. I did not want to go back and re-write/test the great schools script I had written, because it takes almost 4 hours for the script to complete. Instead, I needed to find a way to write a script that would properly interpret what I have. I was unable to solve this issue yet, and will continue to research python libraries to help me resolve this issue. I will also look into seeing if it would be best to keep everything in json format, since that format will better align with storing our linked database (triple store) we will be creating.
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May 2016
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