WebAtlas - an atlas web service

jventura · Joined: 04 Jan 2011 Posts: 294 Location: Portugal

Hello everyone,

lately I've been needing an easy to use atlas that could give me the geographical positions of locations, the timezone and the UTC offset for a given date and time. There are some paid solutions out there, and free solutions such as the geonames database have almost all the information that I needed but no information about utc offsets.

Therefore, I decided to roll my own solution and created a web service that returns that information. The location information is based on the geonames database and the utc offset information is based on the olson database.

The webatlas can be found in this link: http://webatlas.flatangle.com/

Here's an example with the results for all locations starting with "Lis" on a given date and time:

Jo�o Ventura

Astraea · Joined: 04 Oct 2004 Posts: 355 Location: Colorado, USA

That's really, really helpful. Thank you!

jventura · Joined: 04 Jan 2011 Posts: 294 Location: Portugal

Thanks Astraea!

Btw, made some changes to the style, and added tooltips to the latitude and longitude values. So, when you move the mouse over any lat/lon value, it shows the value as decimal. It may be useful since some software use this..

Jo�o Ventura

Martin Gansten · Posted: Thu May 05, 2016 2:44 pm Post subject:

I agree with Astraea, it looks really useful. Thank you.
_________________
http://www.martingansten.com

james_m · Joined: 05 Dec 2011 Posts: 3677 Location: vancouver island

thanks joao

it might come in really handy for me from time to time.. thank you!

jventura · Joined: 04 Jan 2011 Posts: 294 Location: Portugal

Added another feature: If you move the mouse over a location name, it now opens a tooltip with the map. Since some locations may share similar names on the same country, it allows us to be sure which location is which.

The maps are 100% functional google maps, including zooming and panning..

Jo�o Ventura

Astraea · Joined: 04 Oct 2004 Posts: 355 Location: Colorado, USA

Wow! These features you've added are wonderful - especially the map tool, it adds a nice dimension of context to the data.

zoidsoft · Joined: 10 Feb 2006 Posts: 991 Location: Pulaski, NY

Jo�o,

I was going to do this with the Terran Atlas a couple of years ago, but Google wanted a $10,000/year annual fee. Did they change their policy?
_________________
Curtis Manwaring
Zoidiasoft Technologies, LLC

jventura · Joined: 04 Jan 2011 Posts: 294 Location: Portugal

Hi Curtis,

I have the idea that the Web APIs have always been free up to a certain number of requests. For instance, the Google Maps JavaScript API (the one I'm using on this project) is free up to 25.000 requests per day.

https://developers.google.com/maps/pricing-and-plans/

I wish I had that number of requests daily! Very Happy

Jo�o Ventura

zoidsoft · Joined: 10 Feb 2006 Posts: 991 Location: Pulaski, NY

jventura · Joined: 04 Jan 2011 Posts: 294 Location: Portugal

I guess you're right! Since I'm using Google Maps on a free web application, I didn't bother to look into the details for commercial applications. But I can do the same reading as you do..

However, for commercial applications there seems to be alternatives with OpenStreetMaps (http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Frameworks#Webmaps).

For instance, Leaflet (http://leafletjs.com/) seem to use the tiles from a *.tile.osm.com server. But the osm.com guys do not want commercial applications retrieving map tiles from their servers (although they do not enforce anything), and suggest other providers (http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tile_usage_policy). Some of these seem to allow commercial applications with restrictions.

If you are still interested in that, you can try to check those links..