POI Naming

Welcome to The Factory.

A good place to start will be the links in this faq:

http://www.poi-factory.com/node/6664

I would start by deciding what format you wanted for you POI file.Assuming Garmin, your choices are CSV and GPX. Both are text based, but of the 2, CSV is the easier for newbies to create.

The CSV format has 4 fields, Longitude, Latitude, POI Name and Description. The first two are self-explanatory but it's the last two that cause the most frustration. For a POI Name, it should be descriptive enough that if a person was to search the file the name would provide a clue as to what or where the location has. An example would be something like: Harry's Shoes - Hoboken. This tells you what the location is and a rough idea of where it can be found. Of course, you can substitute almost anything such as Millie's Millinery - Mississauga, but you get the idea.

The fourth field is more difficult. Suffice it to say it should contain at least a street address, city, state or province. Additional items that are often helpful are the postal or zip code and the phone number. It's best to separate these individual elements with some delimiter such as a comma. An example would be 123 Main St., Anytown, NB A0B 1C2, 000-000-0000.

The easiest way to work these files is using a spreadsheet program such as Excel. The coordinates can be obtained in several ways, for individual addresses I like http://www.itouchmap.com/latlong.html. Just key in the address and then you can zoom in as necessary to move the pointer to the exact location. You can then copy the coordinates (in decimal degree format) and paste them into you file..

Boxcar, thanks very much for the help. I did not know any of the above. Now to do more research and find out what, where, when, how, etc. etc. Thanks again. Hope to see you around.
Dan

(link no longer available)

http://www.poi-factory.com/node/25743

http://www.poi-factory.com/node/25752

The links provided by Charlesd45 are good, but even with my experience they are confusing to follow. Additionally, they talk about using another program, Extra POI Editor. Extra POI Editor, or EPE for short is a very powerful program that does require additional setup and some learning to use. Since you are just getting started, I don't recommend jumping into this immediately.

The easiest method to get started is to follow Box Car's guidelines. Excel, or any spreadsheet program is the simplest way to go about organizing the data. It helps you see what is in each field and you don't need to worry as much about all the delimiter characters as saving the file in CSV format handles the grouping for you.

Box Car purposely left out any discussions of quotation marks mentioned in Charlesd45's FAQs as Excel handles them automatically and they are so easy to get wrong if you use a text editor such as Notepad or Wordpad. (Now, there are a lot of other text editors available, but these are the most common.)

Charlesd45's FAQs also mention that the lat and lon should have 6 decimal places. That's better stated as "up to 6 decimal places." Sometimes an address will be close enough to a line of latitude or longitude that it won't generate 6 decimal places. What you do need to be certain is that your spreadsheet is formatted to display the 6 decimal places. Even though Excel will store the correct precision, if the display is set to only 2 decimal places it does confuse you when editing.

Now, as to geocoding or obtaining the coordinates for an address. Some like Google Earth, some like GPSVISUALIZER and others like other programs. A lot depends on how many addresses you need to code at any particular time. Like Box Car, I like itouchmap. It is Google but when the pointer is displayed, the lat and lon is also displayed in decimal format. If you move the pointer the lat and lon display goes away but clicking on the pointer will show you the new values. No need to do the extra steps Google Earth requires.

One final word, all the discussion here has been centered on building a CSV or Comma Separated Variable format file. Stick with a CSV until you are very comfortable with the file format and how to build a complete POI file in this format. When you have EXPERIENCE playing and manipulating files in this format come back and ask for some more help on converting CSV files and creating GPX files. There are a lot of similarities, but then there are a lot of differences as well. GPX files use Hypertext Markup Language or HTML tags to define fields and it's a "whole different ball game" without some help. This is what EPE was designed for and built.

I have been expermenting with writing my own pois for the past few weeks with very little success until i read this article. (POI NAMING). I was doing it right but forgetting to add .CSV to my file name. Thanks guys for the link that got me the help i needed.

Here is a FAQ that assumes the user knows nothing about POI files and guides one through the process in creating a file that can be checked out immediately.

http://www.poi-factory.com/node/30395