Location
From MB Wiki
The Location for all activities are automatically assigned by the system. This is how it all works.
We have loaded our database with all of the populated places provided from the U.S. Geological Survey Geographic Names Information System (http://geonames.usgs.gov/) (GNIS) for the United States and its territories and the U.S. Department of Defense Geonet Name Server (http://earth-info.nima.mil/gns/html/) (GNS) for all other countries.
We have merged these two data sources into a single data source so they will mostly behave the same at MotionBased, however, the GNS provides names in other languages where the GNIS is only provided in English. These language-specific names may show up at MotionBased without diacritics. We do have names with diacritics stored, but do not serve them up at this time.
| Table of contents |
Troubleshooting
Incorrect Location
Many of you have found incorrect locations for your activities. There is a reason for this and it isn't one we can completely solve today.
The populated places provided by the GNS and GNIS provide only a single point of reference. They tend to pick the center of the city or perhaps the town square, etc. So you will find many times that you are in the boundary of city, but the location assigned to your activity is a nearby city. This usually happens when near the border of a large city because you are actually farther away from the center of the city you are located than you are to the center of a smaller nearby city.
Take Scottsdale, AZ for instance...Check out the map (http://maps.google.com/maps?q=chamber+of+commerce&ll=33.491808,-111.922713&spn=0.518611,1.172859&near=scottsdale,+az&num=10&start=0&hl=en) to understand that it is a very long, narrow city. Let's just say that we have the center of Scottsdale at the Chamber of Commerce. Scottsdale stretches well north of the Scottsdale airport and if you are doing an activity up there you might end up being classified as the smaller Paradise Valley (http://maps.google.com/maps?q=pizza&spn=0.064829,0.146607&near=paradise+valley,+az&num=10&start=0&hl=en). So we currently choose the closest city to where your activity starts.
Same thing goes with Manhattan, New York. Check out the enhancements to see how we may solve this annoying problem at MB.
Future Enhancements
We are not guaranteeing that these enhancements will be implemented, but rather a good place to share possible strategies to make MB better.
Choose Location
Allowing the customer to choose the location will enable the customer to properly categorize the activity. We will offer the closest one, but you can choose other nearby locations. In fact, we will be able to provide more than just populated places but all types of locations like lakes, mountain peaks and libraries I suppose.
Community Assignment
Once we start allowing customers to choose their own locations, MB can now look into the TrailNetwork to see what others around them had classified the activity as. Now through the power of the community we can start to categorize activities more accurately without modifying the GNS or GNIS data.
ESRI ArcWeb Services
Just like our maps we are able to ask ESRI which location any point is in. they actually have the city boundaries and they know which city you are in, not just near. Unfortunately this is only for the U.S. so we decided not to use it. Doing so also would have caused more complex development and increased our costs when we could provide reasonably accurate information for free.
More Information
Please check out some great discussions on this topic on our Forum:
Incorrect Location (http://forums.motionbased.com/smf/index.php?topic=734.msg2930#msg2930)
Location Naming (http://forums.motionbased.com/smf/index.php?topic=1022.msg2168#msg2168)
