On Wed, June 13, 2007 7:45 am, Jay Blanchard wrote: > I am doing some searching and researching but I also know that this > world famous group may have some insight and resources that I can > benefit from. > > I am looking for an address validation database and API to use with > our > retail applications (does not have to be free). I would prefer to be > able to buy data according to postal code. I will likely use AJAX to > take an address that is input into the system and find a similar or > better address and then offer the user the opportunity to use the > returned address or the one that they put into the system. You have > all > seen this in operation if you use maps.google.com when it does not > flat > out recognize the address. > > Is anyone aware of anything like this that they can point me to? > > Thanks very much in advance.
Both maps.google.com and Yahoo! Maps allow you do use their internal address lookup functionality, just like they do it, and it returns a suggested address as well as how "sure" they are of the result (sort of) by the answer being graded at levesl like "country" "state" "city" etc. Naturally, they both use different coding schemes, and you have to be careful about what you use as input. But if you're looking to mimic the functionality of Google maps, you should use Google maps API to mimic the functionality of Google maps. :-) Google Maps is "free" under certain conditions, and costs $10K/year under other conditions. Yahoo! Maps hasn't announced pricing yet (afaik) and reserves the right to slap advertisements into a map, as I recall. (Or maybe it was Google that reserved the right to advertise?) At any rate, between the two of them, you should be able to get this done for "free" for the forseeable future. PS If Google and/or Yahoo! don't get the address right, I'd be pretty surprised if any other software does it any better.... Though I guess there are geo-spatial mailing lists that could advise you better on that part. -- Some people have a "gift" link here. Know what I want? I want you to buy a CD from some indie artist. http://cdbaby.com/browse/from/lynch Yeah, I get a buck. So? -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
