Provided your use complies with the terms of the Google terms of use, you could 
probably develop an app based on the public Google API.

I figure your proposal essentially involves two steps: 
 develop a public database of placenames & extents 
 provide a service enabling the easy reuse of these data for zooming 
functionality


Note that Google solutions are somewhat arbitrary, so that Chinese placenames 
in Tibet (for example) do not exist in the Indian Google service, and vice 
versa for the Chinese Google service. Similar local variations occur elsewhere, 
so while Google does have a global dataset, it is not implemented as such, but 
as local variants. This is needed to comply with legislative requirements in 
different countries.

An "open global" solution that did not support these political idiosyncrasies 
would be illegal to use in some countries. 

Brent Wood


--- On Tue, 1/31/12, Mr. Puneet Kishor <[email protected]> wrote:

From: Mr. Puneet Kishor <[email protected]>
Subject: [mapserver-users] zoom to place by name
To: [email protected]
Date: Tuesday, January 31, 2012, 4:14 PM

a'ite, this question is neither mapserver-specific nor OL-specific (two 
technologies that I am using gung-ho right now), but both would be involved in 
developing something that I describe below --

you know, how in Google Maps you can type pretty much any location's name, and 
if it finds a match in its database, Google Maps zooms to the boundary of that 
location. For example, if I type 

    http://maps.google.com/maps?q=Zurich,+Switzerland

or 

    http://maps.google.com/maps?q=Dane+County,+WI

or 

    http://maps.google.com/maps?q=New+York+City

the map zooms to the bounds of that location. This is what I want to develop, 
for the entire world. I guess the starting point would be the geonomes 
database, except, if I understand correctly, geonames does not have the bounds 
of locations. Instead, it has only the centroids of locations.

A better way might be something like the following --

I am using Google Maps as my base layer anyway. Could I somehow submit a search 
through my application to the Google Maps base layer, return the bounds and 
zoom to that?

Thoughts? Suggestions?

--
Puneet Kishor_______________________________________________
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