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rFocus Corporation currently makes a limited number of GIS (Geographic Information
System) -related web services available to the public. Due to the costs involved
with high-precision results, these free services are currently limited in their
scope and accuracy. However, their main purpose is to showcase some of the technologies
our company has been involved in and provide a simple resource for anyone for whom
basic geolocation information will suffice.
Descriptions
1)IP Address Lookup: This web service attempts to correlate an
IP address with a latitude/longitude coordinate.
*Currently limited to the USA. Database is still limited in size.
2)Physical Address Geocoding: This service attempts to convert
a physical address (e.g. 123 My Street, Anytown, MyState) to a latitude/longitude
coordinate
3)Reverse Geocoding: This service attempts to use a latitude/longitude
pair to find an existing physical address.
*Currently limited to the USA.
4)Wikipedia Article Lookup: This web service attempts to locate
a collection of Wikipedia articles that are
geographically related to the passed latitude/longitude coordinate.
5)Weather Report Lookup: This service attempts to locate a weather
report from a station near the passed latitude/longitude coordinate.
6)Courier Package Tracker: These services parse a tracking number
and convert it into a series of geographic coordinates to track the package's progress.
Usage
The method for consuming these web services will depend on your development tool
but in essence you will need to add a new web reference to your project and point
it to a WSDL file. Depending on the service you desire, choose one of the following:
.NET Proxy Class
The generated proxy class will contain six principle methods, each corresponding
to a pair of return types from the three aforementioned web services. Either a JSON
string or a proprietary GeocodeResult object
are available. The methods and their parameters are as follows:
GeocodeResult IPAddressLookup(string ipAddress)string IPAddressLookupJson(string
ipAddress)GeocodeResult PhysicalAddressLookup(string address)string PhysicalAddressLookupJson(string address)GeocodeResult ReverseGeocode(double latitude, double
longitude)string ReverseGeocodeJson(double
latitude, double longitude)
Java Proxy Class
The generated proxy class will contain ten principle methods, each corresponding
to a pair of return types from the three aforementioned web services. Either a JSON
string or a strongly-typed proprietary object are available. The methods and their
parameters are as follows:
WikipediaResult getWikipediaArticles(double
latitude, double longitude)String getWikipediaArticlesJson(double
latitude, double longitude)WeatherResult getWeatherReport(double
latitude, double longitude)String getWeatherReportJson(double
latitude, double longitude)PackageTrackResult getFedExPackageTrackResult(String trackingNumber)String getFedExPackageTrackResultJson(String trackingNumber)PackageTrackResult getUpsPackageTrackResult(String trackingNumber)String getUpsPackageTrackResultJson(String trackingNumber)PackageTrackResult getUspsPackageTrackResult(String trackingNumber)String getUspsPackageTrackResultJson(String trackingNumber)
The links in the right column show basic examples consuming these web services,
combining the technologies of the Google
Maps API, Microsoft's ASP.NET AJAX
(.NET services), and the CXF library
(Java services).
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