Living Within the Geoweb
It's surprising how much of our everyday lives is associated with locations. Where we live, where our friends live, work, shopping, and entertainment—all have a location. Some of these locations are interesting to people outside our local sphere, and some are not. Among the locations of interest:
The location of an event or party we're invited to
Addresses for friends and family members
Where a photo was taken
Locations for great coffee shops, restaurants, parks, etc.
Where something important is happening now
Finding Longitudes and Latitudes
Before you even begin to work with mapping tools, you need the ability to "map" between an address and its associated longitude and latitudes. Some of the map APIs work with addresses, but support is limited. Most of the mapping APIs work best with longitude and latitudes, but we don't always run around with GPS devices capturing these values as we travel about.
There are sites online that provide both values when given an address. Figure 14-9 shows the results from one of the more comprehensive of these sites, MelissaDATA (at http://www.melissadata.com/Lookups/addressverify.asp). The page not only provides the longitude and latitude, but also information about political representatives, school zones, police stations, postal data, and so on. Another site, maintained by Stephen Morse (at http://stevemorse.org/jcal/latlon.php), provides a results page from a lookup on addresses at various sites. It also provides a link to the ...