march 2005 archives

Monday, March 14, 2005

Free linking, the Microsoft approach

Many mapping websites allow you to build a custom link to put on your website to tell your visitors where you are located and how to get there. Also in the upcoming Mapping Hacks book I wrote a hack about linking to maps from Multimap and MapQuest. Now you can do the same with MSN Maps & Directions. You can build hyperlinks to map specific locations, but you can also have your visitors calculate a route to your location.

You can specify a location by supplying either an address or a coordinate pair. For example, I am living here:

http://maps.msn.nl/home.aspx?
strt1=herderplein&city1=utrecht&cnty1=12

The cnty1 parameter is an internal code to specify the country. If you would like to be more precise or bypass the ambiguity of human language addresses, this works as well:

http://maps.msn.nl/map.aspx?
lats1=52.09022&lons1=5.08159&alts1=2&name=webmapper&regn1=1

Again, the regn1 parameter is an internal code to specify the region:

Further instructions explain how to build hyperlinks to calculates routes. That's definitely something to cover in a future post on webmapper. Stay tuned!  permanent link for this entry

Wednesday, March 02, 2005

Privacy and location: a mapping hack

As an editor of the Kartografie in Nederland website, I recently received a question from a member of the public through the mailing list that sparked a lot of map hacking. Someone was after the names and addresses of all the people who lived along streets named Veldstraat in the Netherlands. So how do you go about this?

  1. Get all the postal towns that have a street named Veldstraat through Multimap or MSN MapPoint. On the MapPoint website, select the Netherlands for the country, type Veldstraat in the Street Address search box and an asterisk (*) in the City search box. Both web sites give you a list of all the streets with corresponding 4 position postcodes (Dutch post codes consist of 4 digits and 2 letters) and postal towns.
  2. Get the full postcodes for all streets. On the TPG Post postcode search facility, you supply the street name together with a random house number and the name of the postal towns. Thus, you obtain the full 6 position postcode for that street segment. Each 6 position postcode contains on average 15 houses, so you may have to supply the same streetname/postal town combination with changing house numbers.
  3. In the reversed telephone directory, you enter the streetname, the full postcode and the postal town to get the names and phone numbers of all people in that postcode area. Have your search results ordered by street name and house number.
  4. On the results page, you can download the results to Excel. Now you can have your letters automatically addressed to all people living along any of the streets named Veldstraat.

Well, you are right: only the first step is a genuine mapping hack. Nevertheless, it takes a bit of patience, but then you have a lot of information. How about mapping all people with a specific surname in Belgium or the Netherlands?  permanent link for this entry