API to suggest nearby streets

Question

For an app I'm developing, I want to use the phone's GPS to locate it. I then want it to list streets that are nearby. The customer might be in his back garden for example, and this may be closer to another street, but not be the street he actually lives on.

I am thinking, I can ask the API several times and skew the coordinates slightly in each request. But that might be expensive in money and time.

Is there an API that can do such a thing in one request?

Answer 1

You can send the Phone's GPS position to Yahoo Place Finder (API) request

http://where.yahooapis.com/geocode?location=37.787082+-122.400929&gflags=R&appid=yourappid

lat/lng=37.787082,-122.400929 (GPS cords)

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>  
<ResultSet version="1.0">  
  <Error>0</Error>  
  <ErrorMessage>No error</ErrorMessage>  
  <Locale>us_US</Locale>  
  <Quality>99</Quality>  
  <Found>1</Found>  
  <Result>  
    <quality>99</quality>  
    <latitude>37.787082</latitude>  
    <longitude>-122.400929</longitude>  
    <offsetlat>37.787082</offsetlat>  
    <offsetlon>-122.400929</offsetlon>  
    <radius>500</radius>  
    <name>37.787082 -122.400929</name>  
    <line1>655 Mission St</line1>  
    <line2>San Francisco, CA  94105-4126</line2>  
    <line3/>  
    <line4>United States</line4>  
    <house>655</house>  
    <street>Mission St</street>  
    <xstreet/>  
    <unittype/>  
    <unit/>  
    <postal>94105-4126</postal>  
    <neighborhood/>  
    <city>San Francisco</city>  
    <county>San Francisco County</county>  
    <state>California</state>  
    <country>United States</country>  
    <countrycode>US</countrycode>  
    <statecode>CA</statecode>  
    <countycode/>  
    <hash/>  
    <woeid>12797156</woeid>  
    <woetype>11</woetype>  
    <uzip>94105</uzip>  
  </Result>  
</ResultSet>  

Extract your street from this response.

Answer 2

What you're looking for is a service that can offer reverse-geocoding to get an approximate street address location and then using the ZIP+4 street data, determine the surrounding streets. Google offers a reverse-geocoding API. From there, you can use the street data (with geo-coordinates) from the US Census Bureau TIGER data to determine proximity.

You will need to determine your definition of "close". Do you want all the streets within a certain radius – rural addresses may fail in this case – or do you want to just list the first 10 streets regardless of distance away from the location? Remember, that the TIGER data gives a start and stop point for each street based on the intersections so there may be a street that is closer to the destination but might be incorrectly displayed as further away if the end points are not very proximate to the location. In that case, perhaps you could first determine the median centerpoint coordinates for each street within a larger subset and use that to determine proximity.

With that said, I have also not seen a service exactly like what you are seeking. I work at an address verification company called SmartyStreets and we are working on something that does this with our API but it's not finished yet so don't tell anyone.

Wait, is this forum public? D'oh! (It's just not done yet so I can't show you anything yet.)

Answer 3

I am not aware of any and if there really isn't one, you're left with creating a thin intermediate service to externalise the extra calls. You'd pass it the coordinates like usually and it would return the nearest few streets. Either by calling standard services multiple times with slightly shifted coordinates (like you mentioned) or by doing a nicer spatial query - checking for intersections between vector street data and a fixed buffer around the passed coordinates. You probably don't have all the required data for the latter though, since OSM coverage is partial.