Creating POI Files - How much time do you spend
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 16 years
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How much time do you spend creating a POI file?
Here's what I've done so far. I wanted Union 76 gas stations so I contacted Conoco Phillips. They were nice enough to send me an excel spread sheet with not only Union 76 but also Phillips 66 and Conoco station addresses. I filtered out the Union 76 stations which was over 1800 stations. I then used gpsvisualizer.com/geocoder to geocode addresses to coordinates. If you choose the Yahoo option, I was able to do 1000 at a time. If you choose Google option, I could only do 100 at a time but then I could also choose "include extra fields in output" which included precision, city, county, etc. This came in handy. For precision, it lets you know if the coords are to a city (couldn't find street), to a street (couldn't find address) of if they are to an address (the most accurate). I then sorted out all the "cities" and "streets". For those, I did whatever I could to see if it was a typo on their part, a bad abbreviation, etc. I also used Google street view to find the actual station. Some were so bad I just had to delete (only about 3 or 4). I now think I have "address" accuracy on all of them. I then, for fun, matched up the Google with Yahoo coordinates to see which were different (I'm still working on this). If you subtract the Latitude from Google and the Latitude from Yahoo, it should be 0, then do the same for Longitude. Ones with large numbers means Google and Yahoo don't agree so investigate further. So now, is this about where most stop and just let people find the errors out in the field? They should be somewhat close. All POI's will also show the address and phone on your GPSr to help. I already found a couple in my area that are a little off. I'd like to Google Street View all of them but 1800 of them?!!? Maybe a few at a time over the next year. Oh, I also used The Verifier which passed after a few tweaks. Anything else I should do or any other good suggestions? Thanks.
I usually stop at
I usually stop at the address level resolution from Google. The GPS is supposed to get me in the vicinity and with address or intersection precision it's probably doing its job.
When I can't get better than street resolution, I'll use other tools such as itouchmap, street view, Yahoo driving directions and find business. As to comparing the two services, Yahoo and Google to be certain coordinates are the same requires you to assume they use the same algorithms for searching and address resolution.
But then every POI and every business is different. Gas stations are not normally located in shopping malls where restaurants and fast food places can be so even the extra tools are not always a help.
ɐ‾nsǝɹ Just one click away from the end of the Internet
You are truly dedicated
I enter the coordinates from gps visualizer and consider the file complete. I'm beginning to feel like a slacker now.
One more thing on geocoding
One more trick on using visualizer to bulk geocode. If you set the separator to Tab, then you can copy and paste the output directly into a spreadsheet. Using comma requires you to import it from a text document.
ɐ‾nsǝɹ Just one click away from the end of the Internet
I take advantage of visual basic
With visual basic I can write subroutines to sort and match data with lat/lon data. Also insert line feed characters between information to separate address, city/state/zip, phone numbers, and other comments. It is only good for garmin units but it helped in making ohio catholic mass times poi.
260, 295W, 1490T,2455LMT
Me, too
I enter the coordinates from gps visualizer and consider the file complete. I'm beginning to feel like a slacker now.
Me, too.
Denis - Bellingham, WA - nuvi 260W
me too
I feel like a slacker too.
Since I read the Extra Poi Editor discussion on this site, I found it to help me make better POI files in less time.
http://www.poi-factory.com/node/21156