MadMode

Dan Connolly's tinkering lab notebook

geocoding and hCards for airports from wikipedia

Inspired by the SXSW hCard/google map mash-up, I'm geocoding some of my travel data.

In palmagent, I started on a module to get airport lat/long info from wikipedia; it grabs some other hCard info meanwhile:

~/devcvs/2001/palmagent$ python aptdata.py LAX
getting list of airports contatining LAX in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_airports_by_IATA_code:_L
looking for LAX in text
link path: /wiki/Los_Angeles_International_Airport
finding data in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_International_Airport
{'url': 'http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_International_Airport', 'org': 'Los Angeles International Airport', 'nickname': 'LAX', 'geo': {'latitude': 33.942500000000003, 'longitude': -117.59194444444445}, 'tz': -8}

I don't have a kid template yet, but I hope you get the idea.

Along the way, I found a wikipedia airport project and this really cool NAC coding system; basically, it's base 30 lat/long/altitue. Two 4-digit numerals get you down to a building, and with 5 digits, you get down to the square meter. Looks like a great GeoOnion technique.

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