hile, GPS geeks! to me!
Jul. 13th, 2005 12:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
topazAt work we are exploring the possibility of using reverse geocoding to identify a VoIP user's location for 911 calls: we get their GPS coordinates, look them up in a GIS server and figure out which street address they're at.
There are a few sites which allow reverse geocoding lookups over the Web, mostly on a free-trial basis for evaluating someone's pricey GIS server software. I'm using these to determine how accurately we can get a user's fix. For that, I need data. And that, dear reader and owner of a handheld GPS device, is where you come in.
I need to collect a bunch of street addresses and the latitude/longitude that a GPS receiver reports at each of those locations. On this side I can do the reverse lookup and see how closely it matches your actual address. The more far-flung the locations, the better, as long as they're in the 50 U.S. states. (I'm not sure if we're required to provide 911 service in Puerto Rico or Guam.) I will be happy to tell you the results I get, if that makes it more appealing. :-)
If you'd like to help, please feel free either to post the results here or mail them to twp@rnktel.com, whatever you prefer :-)
There are a few sites which allow reverse geocoding lookups over the Web, mostly on a free-trial basis for evaluating someone's pricey GIS server software. I'm using these to determine how accurately we can get a user's fix. For that, I need data. And that, dear reader and owner of a handheld GPS device, is where you come in.
I need to collect a bunch of street addresses and the latitude/longitude that a GPS receiver reports at each of those locations. On this side I can do the reverse lookup and see how closely it matches your actual address. The more far-flung the locations, the better, as long as they're in the 50 U.S. states. (I'm not sure if we're required to provide 911 service in Puerto Rico or Guam.) I will be happy to tell you the results I get, if that makes it more appealing. :-)
If you'd like to help, please feel free either to post the results here or mail them to twp@rnktel.com, whatever you prefer :-)
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2005-07-13 06:45 pm (UTC)Why, yes. Yes, that would be very helpful indeed!
no subject
Date: 2005-07-19 05:48 pm (UTC)*waves to Topaz*
Greetings! I'm said friend. The company is Global Locate (http://www.globallocate.com). Whatcha wanna know? :)
no subject
Date: 2005-08-03 05:03 pm (UTC)Well hi! What do I want to know.... well... ANYTHING!
Seriously, here's our current problem in a nutshell. We're a VoIP company. We need to provide 911 operators with a caller's current physical location, but we don't technically know what that is -- they could have picked up their IP phone and flown to Toledo since the last time we heard from them.
Our current plan is to connect each phone to an A-GPS receiver that phones home once in a while to let us know where they are. We would like to be able to take their GPS coordinates, automagically turn those into street addresses, and deliver whatever address that is to the 911 folks. I am coming to believe that's an impossible problem -- reverse geocoding just doesn't seem to be sufficiently accurate to satisfy the needs of the emergency services folks. But maybe there are some tricks I haven't yet figured out.
If you have time to ruminate on some of this or share anything about what you know, please feel free to write me at twp@rnktel.com. Seriously, we don't have anyone with solid GPS experience here, so we don't have a really clear idea of what's possible, what's implausible and what's completely off the table. So I'd love to talk to someone who's done serious work in this space.
no subject
Date: 2005-08-03 06:17 pm (UTC)