tyrauber/open_places

A Location Autocomplete Rails 4 Engine

OpenPlaces

OpenPlaces is a Location Autocomplete Rails 4 Engine. It imports NaturalEarthData.com and Geonames.org geospatial data and provides a mountable JSON/GeoJSON API endpoint.

Requirements

Requires Postgres and PostGIS.

OpenPlaces uses Postgres and the PostGIS adapter to do fast geo-spatial and full text search. A Rails 4 application with a Postgres database with the PostGIS extension is required to use OpenPlaces.

Installation

1. Add 'open_places' to your Gemfile and bundle install
2. Run rake open_places:install:migrations
3. Run rake db:migrate
4. Mount the engine: mount OpenPlaces::Engine => "/api/geo"
5. Restart your server

Visit: http://localhost:3000/api/geo?q=Seattle

Usage

The api endpoint is able to do a couple different operational queries

• q= Exact Match
• like= Fuzzy Match (using postgres ts_vector)
• contains= Contains (LIKE '%?%')
• starts= Starts with (LIKE '?%')
• ends= Ends with (LIKE '%?')

Additionally, it will take a near param, a latitude,longitude string. With a near param, a distance attribute is added and the results are ordered by population, distance, and ts_rank if the operational query is like.

Data Structure

OpenPlaces includes a rake task to build a single database table of normalized data. For convenience, a 12Mb CSV file is included for fast import. The data includes the following fields:

• geo_type
  • subtype
  • scalerank
• code
• name
• long_name
• country
• country_code
• province
• province_code
  • continent
  • region_un
  • subregion
  • region_wb
• latitude
• longitude
  • x_min
  • y_min
  • x_max
  • area

Data Sources

OpenPlaces imports Countries, States/Provinces, Cities, National Parks, Lakes and Rivers from Natural EarthData.com and Geonames.org.

Total Records

• 255 Countries
• 4516 States/Provinces
• 146474 Places (Metros/Cities/Towns)
• 61 US National Parks
• 743 Lakes
• 1454 Rivers