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		<a href="/posts/geocoding-services.html">Geocoding Services</a></h1>
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		<span class="dateline">Posted: <time itemprop="datePublished" datetime="2013-09-25">2013-09-25</time></span>
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		<p>A key component for any routing service is being able to do geocoding. Most people who are looking for routes most probably don&rsquo;t know exactly where their start and end points are on the map. Even then, manually looking for a location on a map is a time-consuming task.</p>

<p>The gold standard for doing geocoding right now is Google Maps. It&rsquo;s hard to find a better location search experience. If they actually provided routing for jeeps here in the Philippines, I imagine there wouldn&rsquo;t be <em>that</em> much you could do for the competition.</p>

<p>When the competition started though, I took it as a challenge to avoid Google Maps as much as possible. I wanted to see how much is currently possible with other options such as OpenStreetMap. In fact, OSM does have a geocoding service called <a href="http://nominatim.openstreetmap.org">Nominatim</a>.</p>

<p>Sadly, for a mapping app, what you want to do is not simply just geocoding. With geocoding, you take an address and turn it into coordinates. When you want to search for a place in a mapping app, you take part of an address, infer the rest of it, and give the user options to choose from.</p>

<p>Given a typical mapping app, you might type in &ldquo;ateneo&rdquo; and expect it to give you Ateneo de Manila University. With typical geocoding services like Nominatim or even Google&rsquo;s <a href="https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/geocoding">geocoding API</a>, you probably won&rsquo;t get any result for this. What you want to use is the <a href="https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/places">Places API</a> which provides an autocomplete search box. Using it, when you type in &ldquo;ateneo&rdquo;, it automatically suggests in the dropdown, &ldquo;Ateneo de Manila University&rdquo;.</p>

<p>A downside to using the Places API is that it&rsquo;s against the terms of service to use it with something that isn&rsquo;t Google Maps, which means no OpenStreetMap. If there were more time, writing your own autocompletion engine using OpenStreetMap&rsquo;s data will probably be a better long term solution.</p>

<p>For now, since the competition&rsquo;s deadline is just a few days away, I&rsquo;ll be using Google Maps.</p>

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