[Roadster] Importing Tiger issue

[Arne Götje ( 高盛華 )]

On Friday 29 July 2005 02:16, Koen Kooi wrote:
> Ian McIntosh wrote:

Ian, somehow your mail didn't come through to my Inbox, but other mails 
on the list do. Is there something wrong with your mailer? Do you get 
any bounces when you send mail to me?

> > Hi Arne,
> >
> > I am the original author.
> >
> > Nope, no one is working on improving the import function.  I have
> > been planning on replacing the current import code with an external
> > library (either libmygis[1] or gdal[2]).
>
> GDAL also gives you projection conversions for free, but I'm not sure
> how well it handles paths and vectors, but shapelib could help with
> that.
>
> regards,
>
> Koen

ok, conversion tool for the projections is nice, shapefile support is 
also needed as many countries publish their GIS information through 
shapefiles. But what about Tiger support? I'm aware that the US Census 
data is currently the only (?) free downloadable data available...
I'm not aware of libmygis' capabilities when it comes to importing Tiger 
data... are all fields and types supported? Or only some of them? I'm 
not sure if it's a good idea to rely on a third party library for that 
(in case they change the Tiger format again, for example).

> > I'd like to hear your ideas for the search.  The current search box
> > searches both roads and Points of Interest (POI) and works like
> > this:
> >
> > For POI, it uses the rule "all search words must be present
> > somewhere in POI data fields".  It means that more search words ==
> > fewer results, like Google.
> >
> > For roads, the search words must be a prefix of the road name
> > ("Welling" will match "Wellington").  House numbers and suffixes
> > ("st", "ave") are optional and will result in fewer results
> > (direction prefixes/suffixes like "NW" aren't supported yet, but
> > will also be optional).
> >
> > It will also have city/state searching eventually.
> >
> > All results are sorted by distance from the current view.  Closer
> > things show up higher in the list, with the rationale being that
> > it's more likely what the user wants.  We could also weight the
> > results to show "bigger" things, like cities, higher in the list.

I think the sorting preferences should be configuarble by the user... :)

ok, I got similar information already from your wiki page... :)
Actually I ment the internal search function... what happens when a user 
searches for an address, which tables are looked up in which order, and 
how does the rendering engine get the vector information from the 
database to draw the entire map in the screen?

As you might have noticed, I'm sitting on the opposite side of the 
globe, in Taiwan. But originally I'm from Europe. So, I'm keen to 
provide some efford to make roadster be able to support other 
countries' mapping data and to be able to search for their addresses 
which have a different format than the US. :)

Hence we need to reorganize the internal data storage and the search 
function / dialog to be able to search for any address in the world (at 
least theoretically). :)

Is roadster UTF-8 safe yet? :p

I'm also quite a bit annoyed about the huge overhead of the embedded 
mysql server... So I'm thinking of other possibilities to store the 
data effectively. (Hence my question on the internal lookup function).

Cheers
Arne
-- 
Arne Götje (高盛華) <arne at linux.org.tw>
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