Tuesday 1 April 2008

motorway junction geocoder

It's a yahoo pipe, which for some major subset of UK motorways, takes the motorway and junction numbers, and returns a geo thing.

This came out of an idea I've mentioned here, and which Ive since discovered is the basis of this product.

But while I was playing around, I realised that none of the big mapping providers do this - or at least I couldn't get them to. Perhaps you'll do better than me, "M6 Junction 6" always landed me in Manchester. Not where I wanted to be.

So I searched, and searched, and found a couple of GPS waypoint files listing UK motoroway junctions. None of them in any kind of useful format. Still, where there's a will...

So out comes gpsbabel, and a few 'tests' later, I've got a GPX file, which works. The rest of the pipe is about getting the XML structure to work.

It doesn't do much, but as far as I know it's the only one of it's kind, and it does do what it's supposed to.

I'm pretty pleased with meself, me.

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