Geo location suggestion - google-maps-api-3

Is there any way to achieve auto completing as similar to the http://maps.google.com where it directly start doing suggestions even if I type a single letter?
I know theres this google.maps.places.Autocomplete class however I definetly need to suggest for a single country and this is not possible with this API due to lack of settings.
Thanks

You should specify bounds parameter in the request.
bounds is a google.maps.LatLngBounds object specifying the area in which to search for Places. The results are biased towards, but not restricted to, Places contained within these bounds.
see: http://code.google.com/intl/fr/apis/maps/documentation/javascript/places.html#places_autocomplete

Related

API design: naming "I want one more value outside time boundaries"

I'm designing an API to query the history of a value over a time period. Think about a temperature value, and you want to query all the values for today.
I have a from and a to parameter to specify the boundaries of the query.
The values available may not exactly match the boundaries requested. For example, if from is 2016-02-17T00:00:00Z, the first value may be on 2016-02-17T00:04:30Z. To fully represent a graph of the period, it is necessary to retrieve one more value outside the given range. The value on 2016-02-16T23:59:30Z is useful and it would be convenient for the user to not have to make another query to retrieve it.
So as the API designer I'm thinking about a parameter with a pair a of boolean values that would tell for each boundary: give me one more value if there is no value exactly on the boundary.
My question is how to name this parameter as English is not my native language.
Here are a few ideas I have so far but with which I'm not totally satisfied:
overflow=true,true
overstep=true,true
edges=true,true
I would also appreciate any links to existing APIs with that feature, either web API or in programming languages.
Is it possible to make this more of a function/RPC that a traditional rest resource endpoint, so rather than requesting data for a resource between 2 dates like
/myResource?from=x&to=x
something more like
/getGraphData?graphFrom=&graphTo=x
Whilst its only a naming thing, it makes it a bit more acceptable to retrieve results for a task wrapped with outer data, rather than violating parameters potentially giving unexpected or confusing results.

REST resources with a triple as a parameter

When needing to create a URL that takes a finite set of parameters, where all of said parameters are semantically the same "level", what is the current consensus around the use of delimiters within URLs? Here's an example:
/myresource/thing1,thing2,thing3
/myresource/thing2,thing1
/myresource/thing1;thing2;thing3
/myresource/thing1;thing3
That is to say, the parameter here could be a single, a pair or a triple. They can be specified in any order because they are not a logical tree, and thing2 is not a subordinate resource of thing1, so doing something like this seems "wrong":
/myresources/thing1/thing2/thing3
This bothers me because it implies a tree-like relationship between the elements of the triple, and that is not the case (despite many HTTP frameworks seemingly pushing this, wrongly in my view). In addition, using a query string doesn't feel right as this is not a search operation, it is a known triple in a very finite space - there's nothing to query or search, so to speak.
I suppose the other option would be to make it a POST request and supply a body that details the parts of the triple being supplied. This doesn't give me warm fuzzies though, for some reason.
How have others handled this? Delimiters seem clean to me, and communicate the intended semantics of the resource, but i know there are folks would would take a different view, and I was looking to understand the experiences of others who've had similar use cases.
Since any value can be missing and values can appear in any order, How would you know which value is for which parameter (if that matters).
I would have used query string for GET, or in the payload for POST.
Use query parameters
/path/to/the/resource?key1=value1&key2=value2&key3=value3
or matrix parameters
/path/to/the/resource;key1=value1;key2=value2;key3=value3
Without a proper example, I'm not sure exactly about your needs.
However, a little known fact is that any HTTP parameter can have multiple values. It is the way to go when you have a set of objects (see GoogleMaps static API for an example).
/path/to/the/resource?things=thing1&things=thing2&things=thing3
Then you can use the same API for single, pairs, triples (and more).

Mapping GPS coordinates to an area

I have devices moving across the entire country that report their GPS positions back to me. What i would like to do is to have a system that maps these coordinates to a named area.
I see two approaches to this:
Have a database that defines areas as polygons stretching between various GPS coords.
Use some form of webservice that can provide the info for me.
Either will be fine. It doesn't have to be very accurate at all, as i only need to know the region involved so that i know which regional office to call if something wrong happens with the device.
In the first approach, how would you build an SQL table that contained the data? And what would be your approach for matching a GPS coordinate to one of the defined areas? There wouldn't be many areas to define, and they'd be quite large, so manually inputting the values defining the areas wouldn't be a problem.
In the case of the second approach, does anyone know a way of programatically pulling this info off the web on demand? (I'd probably go for Perl WWW::Mechanize in this case). "close to Somecity" would be enough.
-
PS: This is not a "do the work for me" kind of question, but more of a brainstorming request. pseudo-code is fine. General theorizing on the subject is also fine.
In the first approach, how would you build an SQL table that contained
the data? And what would be your approach for matching a GPS
coordinate to one of the defined areas?
Asume: An area is defined as an closed polygon.
You match the GPS coordinate by simply calling a point inside polygon method, like
boolean isInside = polygon.contains(latitude, longitude);
If you have few polygons you can do a brute force search through all existing polygons.
If you have many of them and each (ten-) thousands of points, the you want to use a spatial grid, like a quadtree or k-d tree, to reduce the search to the relevant polygons.
method.
this process is called reverse geocoding, many services providers such as google, yahoo, and esri provide services that will allow to do this thing
they will return the closest point of interest or address, but you can keep the administrative level you are interested in
check terms of use to see which service is compatible with your intended usage

Working with google maps api

I am trying to build a map based query interface for my website and I am having difficulty finding a starting point besides http://developer.google.com. I assume this is a rather simple task but I feel as though I am on a wild goose chase. Anyway the problem is the existing site places people into a category based on their address (primarily the zip code), this is not working out because of odd shapes and user density so I would like to solve the problem by creating custom zones.
I am not looking for a proprietary solution because I would really like to accomplish this on my own, I just need some better places to start or better suggestions for searches.
I understand that I will need to create a map with my predetermined polygons.
I understand how to create a map with polygons via js.
I do not understand how data will request which zone it is within and how it will return it as a hash I can store. eg. user=>####, zone=>####, section=>#####
http://blog.appdelegateinc.com./point-in-polygon-checking-with-google-maps.html
has some JS you can add to give the ability to test whether a point is within a polygon (sample: http://blog.appdelegateinc.com./static/samples/point_in_polygon.html ) using this approach: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_in_polygon#Ray_casting_algorithm
I think as you place the markers, you'll hold them in an array (of objects)...then loop through, doing some sort of reduction of which polygons to test, testing those that remain, if inPoly, set marker.zone and marker.section to whatever suits your needs

How to determine DICOM / DICOMDIR images relationship?

The DICOM images have "Slice location" parameter recorded in addition to the "Slice Thickness".
Question: "Slice location" in where? I understand it's in the body depth - but it must be in images as well, right?
I think a series must or may have a corresponding series in which we can find a reference of the "Slice Location".
If I am right, How to find that those images? And then how to establish the point of the slice in the corresponding images?
As well, if you know a well written refference guide to dicom image structure, please share.
Thanks a lot.
The standard specifies that the unit for Slice Location is millimeters. Usually there is a special scout image that is refferenced by slices with an overlay that looks like a grid, that shows where each slice is mapped.
And a suggestion: don't expect it to work "in theory", without trying on real samples. DICOM is rather a collection of all standards that existed at the time it was created. Also, many modalities use their own private tags for additional info. If you need to process the output of a certain modality then you are lucky, you just have to find its DICOM Conformance Statement. If it's for a viewer.. then good luck :)
EDIT: Also, CT series usually have one image with LOCALIZER in the Image Type tag that refferences the rest of images in the series that are slices (or is reffered by them).
Here's a page that contains some good information on DICOM:
http://www.thefullwiki.org/DICOM
As to your question; I think you're looking for the "image number", which defines an order to the image. The "slice location" is a spatial coordinate as to the offset of the image slice; the "image number" is an integer indicating the order of an image in reference to other images. YMMV; DICOM is a very loosely adhered to standard.
I suspect the slice position is for thick slab acquisitions, where the extents of each slice overlap with the next slice. The axial resolution of current scanners is high enough that this does not happen anymore. Hence the slice thickness is used more frequently now as opposed to slice position.
Please look at http://medical.nema.org/dicom/2003/03_10PU.PDF. Especially Annex A.
The method I usually follow is as follows. I access DICOMDIR for the dcm file paths. This can be accessed at tag [0004, 1500]. Once I get all the paths, I iterate through each dcm image to access any property I want. The slice location might be a property in dcm image but without knowing the modality it is quiet difficult to figure out the tag.
dcmtk is a nice library written in C++ that can help to get specific tags or to extract pixel data from dcm images. You can use it to make your life easier.

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