Is there some way to list POIs by location

Bringing them into a program like Excel and you are pretty familiar with Excel, you can parse out the address so you could then sort by ZipCode or City and then split them into how ever many files you want.

Personally, I could just combine the files you mentioned, since when you access them, they ALWAYS show the closest ones to you. I don't see the need to break them down by area.

If you want to see what's around for a location you aren't at yet (like a future vacation), just turn the GPS section off, then you can pick a point in the area you want then set your location to it and then browse at the POI's near that point.

I do have a poi file for the Florida Keys. I started with the motel in Marathon. I google restaurants and attractions in that zip code and for Key West. Google sends the selected items to favorites on my GPS. Easy to transfer those favorites to Mapsource, then save as GPX. I rename the file AAAflorida. It is then the first file in Extras. I delete the favorites on my unit.
After the trip I move it out of CustomPOI on my pc.
I repeat this process for other regions that we visit.
Just an idea. It works slick for me.

Lets say you load the Red Lobster Restaurant file that has all the restaurants in the US and Canada, once you leave the Conch Republic and say you go to Dallas TX your Garmin will only show the 50 closest Red Lobster to your location near Dallas.

IMO is not worth the hassle to delete other than you maybe running out of space in the PND, if that is the case you may want to load the POIs in the external card and have them "all"handy as you move across the country.

This is just my opinion, others here may differ.

Not sure but this may be what ypu are looking for. (link no longer available)

First, I would like to say that I really appreciate all the great input and ideas. They really started the wheels turning.

Charlesd45's solution would probably work well for my present project, but it does not appear to be an easy solution by any means. It uses 3 programs and 16 steps. Each is probably easy enough, but added together they could be a little daunting.

Flaco's comment about the PND (portable navigation device?) getting overloaded if I used the entire dataset is definitely correct. I currently have tens of thousands of waypoints and my ancient Garmin chokes well before that. Also, trying to search by anything but location is a nightmare with more than a few hundred waypoints.

Spokybob's method would work for a brand new, raw dataset, but does not capture the wealth of knowledge that existing datasets have. For instance, how to decide which of the *many* Marathon restaurants is accessible by boat with a 6ft draft? Local knowledge, the kind of information that exists in some data files is the best source of that information.

Also, I don't know how Google sends selected items to favorites on a GPS. That would be great information to have, for sure. Is there a FAQ for that?

Jfossy (and others) have mentioned working in Excel. My hesitation with Excel or other comma delimited file formats is that as I understand it, there can be at most four fields, (Longitude, Latitude, Name and Comment). However the GPX can contain all that plus an encyclopedia's worth of information in addition to Web links, phone numbers, addresses and other extensions.

It may look like I'm grousing about the information posted, but that's far from the truth. The information is great and will work for many kinds of projects. What I'm looking for is something simple that will allow me to load (say) a hundred reefs, rocks, wrecks and fishing spots for the reef south of Key West for one day and then load similar information for the Minefield north of Key West another day and then bridge, marina, anchorage information and inlet (ocean access) data for a trip up the coast in the spring.

I have no problem loading new datasets for trips. In fact I download track information on a regular basis as part of my regular logging. Heck, I still have complete information on that great little Raw Bar along the waterway that I stopped at in 2005. And SCUBA dive sites from the 1990s. And Shrimp Boat “hangs” from the 1980s.

I have a wealth of information, I just need a way to store it and make sense of it once I retrieve it. Sorry to rant, but I wanted make the scope of the ultimate project a little more clear.

Thanks for all the help so far.

Bud

Tough one

Here is long discussion about Google Maps.
http://www.poi-factory.com/node/12132?page=7

You seem to have the opinion that Excel is limited to just four columns. That is far from the truth as it is essentially a flat-file database with about 256 horizontal positions and over 65,000 vertical. The CSV format is just one method of presenting the data, it is the Garmin format for a CSV file that is limited to just four columns.

Personally, the GPX files I build have 13 unique fields defined though the ones I post may not use them all. The CSV files I post are subsets of the GPX with many of the fields for addresses and phone numbers concatenated into just the fourth element of the Garmin formatted file.

Not at all. I do have a degree in Computer Science and many years experience coding. I have done a lot of data munging in my life.

That was my point. And I did say "Excel or other comma delimited file formats," so I don't think I was trying to mislead anyone.

I do believe that GPX is the way to go if you have a rich dataset. It has the capability of holding an incredible amount of information and is extensible. Heck, it can even hold the metadata!

Still, other than charlesd45's solution, which is a little complicated in my opinion, I don't see a solution to the issue of making it location based which is my current stumbling block.

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Bud

Thanks.

How many different POI files would you draw from?

Load all your gpx POIs into BaseCamp. Import your routes and you can see all POIs on the map with your routes.

This is anecdotal, but I have seen it on my 760 and my wife's 255. I have an SD card with about one hundred thousand (100,000) POI's loaded. When the card is in either of our GPS, the startup/loading map is slower and the touch screen reacts slower. My wife noticed it within minutes of me putting the card into her GPS.
I like to have a big selection of POI's and I frequently "play around" to find what's close to my route and destination to find food and entertainment.
This may not help or even be relevent to your intended project. It's just something to consider.

100K data points? Wow!! My Garmin 76Cx can only hold 1,000 waypoints at one time. However it does have all of marine charts for the US and Bahamas with incredible detail in a package small enough to hold in the hand and waterproof enough to carry in a small boat. I suppose that the SD Card is dedicated only to map data and not tracks, routes and waypoints.

Aside from that issue, performance is only a part of the problem. Another is to try as much as possible to minimize data points that are of marginal value. What is the advantage of having the entire US datapoint list loaded, if your current trip is in a small area?

One big disadvantage is to try to look up a waypoint by name. A namespace cluttered with 100K entries is much more difficult to search than one with a few hundred names.

Suppose I'm looking for a Five Guys Burger that is about half way between here and Aunt Martha's so we can meet for lunch. Searching through a limited list is a lot easier than trying to pick one from a list of 1,000 entries.

Still, 100K data points leaves me with datapoint envy.

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Bud

I'm thinking you are considering favorites. Edwardw66 is writing about custom poi. The Mcdonald file on this site is over 15,000. Walmart has nearly 5000. 100K is probably near what I have. 5 guys burgers when installed will show you the nearest 50 locations. You are not looking through over 1000, just the nearest 50 from your current location.
But maybe I am not understanding exactly what you are saying.

Perhaps we don't understand what you are asking. Are you asking if the unit can display multiple categories for a location at the same time? If that's the question, the answer is no. The databases aren't organized by location, they are organized by type or category. Therefore, the internal POI database shipped with the maps will display the 50 locations of the selected category nearest to your current location. The internal database can't be reorganized as the data is not under the control of the end user.

Custom POI files on the other hand can be sliced and diced as desired subject to the information contained within the file. If a field isn't present, the unit will not create missing entries. It's still one category at a time though as that's what is indexed.

I believe you are misunderstanding the difference between Favorites/Waypoints and POI locations.

First think about the fact that your device comes with millions of built in POI locations. You could use your builtins to find lots of places like museums and restaurants around any place you happen to be.

What most of the posters replying to your original post are assuming is that you want to be able to load a bunch of poi-factory POI files of your choice and be able to get the closest of locations from each of the interesting downloaded POI files listed by the 50 that happen to be around you at any point. The number 50 is important because that is the number of POIs that will be shown to you when you make a specific request for, say, Olive Garden restaurants.

To expand a bit, if you had actually asked for Olive Garden restaurants, the 50 closest might include some that were hundreds of miles from where you were. Had you chosen, say, ATMs, then there likely would be 50 within a 10 mile radius in a major city.

What we are trying to say is that you are asking for something that the vast majority of GPS users would find very unhelpful. They would rather look for the closest Olive Garden, rather than scan through the 50 nearest (subjectively chosen) restaurants to find an Olive Garden.

That is not to say that what you are asking for is not desirable in certain circumstances. If you are in an unfamiliar vacation spot, you might very well want to pull up restaurants, nightlife and/or museums nearby in order to plan today's activities. What would be missing is any sense of how appealing any of the 50 closest possible choices might be (unless they had been pre-selected by you).

We would be very interested in the results if you happen to follow charlesd45's suggestion of building your own personal composite POI for some particular location.

As I said, I have Garmin 76Cx and trust me it does not have any builtin museums or restaurants. It is a handheld unit designed for marine use and has found a following with hikers, glider pilots and other groups.

With my current chip, it does have every chart in the US and Bahamas. It also has tide stations and a few wrecks and obstructions.

The advantage is that I can carry it onto any boat or ship and have a wealth of marine navigation tools at my fingertips. I can navigate strange harbors with ease and even use it in a small boat. It is a very worthwhile tool, but it isn't a Nuvi and doesn't have similar capabilities.

If there is nobody here who understands the question or would find such a tool helpful, then I am asking my question in the wrong forum and I apologize for that.

I currently use a similar suite of tools to accomplish the same outcome. I have looked at his process and evaluated the tools he suggests. Part of the process I had developed uses the same tools and process he suggests. Some of my tools have extensions that make the process easier for me.

Either way, it is a a manual process that should be extremely easy to automate and I was hoping that there was an existing simple tool available.

However if this something that the users of this site would find "very unhelpful" then asking the question here was inappropriate.

I apologize for that.

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Bud

This is what happens when people ASSume, we (community) assumed you had a Garmin Nuvi or similar PND, you assumed that the information we were responding to was your handheld.

First thing I did when responding to your question way back at the beginning of the thread was to look at your profile, one to see where you were located, how long you have been in the group and what type of unit you had, it says you have a Garmin so I assumed it was a Nuvi when I posted my first reply.

Most members of the Factory have listed in their profile the units they own, I advise you do the same to avoid misunderstanding in the future.

Hope you can get your question answered by someone familiar with your handheld.

I made a bad mistake by not looking up 76Cx to see what its specs were. Had I done so, I would have seen it was a marine unit (https://buy.garmin.com/shop/shop.do?pID=350&ra=true)

I have items on my Garmin/SD card categorized first by two folders, east or west of the Mississippi. I call Minnesota west to keep things simple. Then I have them divided into states such as "Historical Markers Iowa" or "Choice Hotels Kansas", or rest areas so that I do not have so many items loaded into the memory. I did this because my 1490 would take time to reload as we drove down the road at 70mph.
In my scheme I would have one folder for Florida and another for the Keyes.

A hand held. I used a Magellan explorist and before that a Meridian. They had a limit of 500 waypoints in memory. However I could have many waypoint files on the SD card. As I would leave a region, I loaded the next waypoint file into memory. That might work for you.
That method required a lot of planning for a long vacation. The plus side of those units were the long battery life when hiking or on canoe trips.

I don't want to leave anyone with the impression that I am looking for a solution for my GPS unit. I consider myself a power user and know the unit quite well after having owned it for many years.

I was looking for a solution that would take an input of (say) an infinite number of datapoints and cull them by location thus creating a dataset that is geographically based instead of being based on topic.

Then, once I have eliminated extraneous data based on location, I could then go on to further refine the data into core information about an area. Perhaps using information to eventually get a "sense of place" for an area.

New York and Key West are both islands, but they are vastly different in nature. The datasets that interested users post about them should be able to help tell that story.

It that old Data->Information->Knowledge Pyramid http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIKW_Pyramid

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Bud