Radius Location Finder?

Bryce K. Nielsen

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Jul 18, 2006, 11:38:26 AM7/18/06

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Are there any good 3rd party libraries that would allow me to enter 2
addresses and see how far apart they are from each other, in like miles?
Preferably a webservice, since this feature needs to be built into a
webpage.

-BKN

Eric Hill

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Jul 18, 2006, 1:49:50 PM7/18/06

to Bryce K. Nielsen

Not sure about a third-party library, but all you need are two latitude
and longitude pairs (that you can get from any number of companies that
supply zipcode to lat/lon numbers) and the great circle equation.

There's a javascript based page here:
http://williams.best.vwh.net/gccalc.htm

Simply plug your two coordinates in and get a distance.

Eric

Bryce K. Nielsen

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Jul 18, 2006, 3:40:03 PM7/18/06

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> Not sure about a third-party library, but all you need are two latitude
> and longitude pairs (that you can get from any number of companies that
> supply zipcode to lat/lon numbers) and the great circle equation.
>

Most data-entry people don't know the latitude/longitude of a given
address...

-BKN

John Herbster

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Jul 18, 2006, 3:45:07 PM7/18/06

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"Bryce K. Nielsen" <br...@sysonyx.com> wrote in message

> Most data-entry people don't know the latitude/longitude
> of a given address...

So let your program look it up
http://www.google.com/search?as_q=zip-code+latitude+longitude

Regards, JohnH

Johannes Bjerregaard

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Jul 18, 2006, 4:11:47 PM7/18/06

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Bryce K. Nielsen wrote:

Yahoo has an address geocoding service. I've tested it but can't tell
you anything about how dependable it is for production use:

http://developer.yahoo.com/maps/rest/V1/geocode.html

Like Eric said, the lat/long output of this can be fed into a great
circle calculator to find the distance.

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Doug Olson

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Jul 18, 2006, 11:25:13 PM7/18/06

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This works but there is a limitation:

Rate Limit
The Geocoding service is limited to 5,000 queries per IP address per day.

If you can use a desktop application, there are solutions using Microsoft
MapPoint and lots of support here:

http://mp2kmag.com

Doug

"Johannes Bjerregaard" <jozzb@hotmail> wrote in message
news:44bd4083$1...@newsgroups.borland.com...

Bryce K. Nielsen

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Jul 19, 2006, 11:04:47 AM7/19/06

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> Yahoo has an address geocoding service. I've tested it but can't tell
> you anything about how dependable it is for production use:
>

Trying to figure GEOCode from an address though is a step I want to avoid.
And Maps.Yahoo doesn't do a distance from one address to another (it's in
their FAQ). MapQuest does however, so I think I'll use their OpenAPI. It
does have a daily query limit, but if we surpass that we can just upgrade to
the unlimited version.

-BKN

Johannes Bjerregaard

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Jul 19, 2006, 11:18:50 AM7/19/06

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Bryce K. Nielsen wrote:

The term "geocoding" refers to the process of obtaining the lat/long of
an address, so it's something that has to be done if you want to find
the distance between two addresses. Of course, it sounds like MapQuest
has it all wrapped up for you. Good luck.

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