Geocoding old placenames

Hmmm, well I added a few more lines to the .xml file, and then opened the program and it crashed
Reopened from the zip, works ok now

 

New version would have latest supplied XML file. Ideally the changes are merged into Central XML.

 

Almost certainly your format was invalid. That would cause crash. Can you post what you entered?

 

Looking up an old map at Visions of Britain and selecting 19th century it colour codes the counties of England as follows, what is the modern Google equivalents?

Cumberland
Westmoreland
Northumberland
Durham
North Yorkshire
West Yorkshire
East Yorkshire
Lancashire
Cheshire
Derbyshire
Nottinghamshire
Lincolnshire
Staffordshire
Shropshire
Leicestershire
Rutland
Herefordshire
Worcestershire
Warwickshire
Northamptonshire
Huntingdonshire
Cambridgeshire
Norfolk
Suffolk
Essex
Hertfordshire
Bedfordshire
Buckinghamshire
Oxfordshire
Gloucestershire
Berkshire
Wiltshire
Hampshire
Middlesex
Surrey
Kent
Sussex
Somerset
Dorset
Devon
Cornwall

 

I'll send you a file.

 

Actually, I've been thinking some more.
For me, most of the time its not a simple replacement replace A with B type scenario. It's more of the type, if the address is A,B then replace with A,C
e.g.
Speke, Lancashire should be Speke, Merseyside
West Derby, Lancashire should be West Derby, Merseyside
Ulverston, Lancashire should be Ulverston, Cumbria

So, can this be done in the .xml file?

 

It could but not in its current form

 

Thanks, sounds promising then.

 

Beta 4 now has this feature. Still need to see the xml you wrote that didn't work.

 

I should write a proper guide. Let's see if I can give you an idea of how the program works and then I can work those ideas into a proper guide.

It takes a location you have entered and looks it up on Google. Google then returns a status code, a list of various possible locations and a string of result types.

The status code is typically OK = means it found a result, ZERO_RESULT = it found no results, or OVER_QUERY_LIMIT meaning that you've had your quota for the day.

When it returns OK it returns a flag to say it was a GOOD or PARTIAL match. A partial match means that it didn't use all the text supplied to find a match, a good match means it was happy that the match used all the text. Note a OK match may not mean it is real match eg: it could have matched against somewhere on the other side of the world.

So what I do is check the result types Google gives back to see if the level of match is similar to what was entered. So if for example you have England, Sussex, Walberton then that has 3 levels so I check if the Google result has at least 3 levels. ie: England, Sussex would be rejected as only 2 levels.

The result is also checked to see if it fits inside the country. eg: if the result is USA and the country checked is England then it fails a bounding box check.

So we have the following status :
Google Matched (small green tick) - Google said it was a good match and the levels were ok and it was in the right country so all seems good.
Partial Match (Google) (tick + ?) - Google said it was a partial match but the levels were ok and it was in the right country so it might be decent
No Match (red x) - Google failed to find any form of match
Outside Country Area (red -) - Match found was outside the boundary of the country
Partial Match (Levels) - Google said it was a match but levels were wrong eg: result type was a county and you asked for a town.

There are also:
Not Searched - location hasn't been geocoded yet
Incorrect (User Marked) - User has marked the location as incorrect
GEDCOM/User Data - User has marked the location as correct (or the lat/long was in the GEDCOM file).

 

The yellow warning ! is my way of saying the match isn't likely to be that good probably not as good as ones Google said it got right or almost right. It gets a yellow ! when Google gave a result that was "less accurate" than the input data. So if you have a long string eg: England, County, town, street, housename and Google returns a match for town then you get a yellow !. However you'd also get a yellow ! if it returned just a street match as its still less detail than a housename. Now of course not all queries have a housename in the 5th field. Sometimes it could be a less specific thing its text I just can't tell what exactly the form of the address will be. So the yellow ! is my way of saying it could well be right but it might not.

In many cases a partial or level mismatch will be something like England, UK which isn't that specific and is a good candidate for manually editing.

Note that for ALL addresses if you use the Display Geocoded Locations option from the Maps menu on the main form then you can right click on an address and mark it as verified if the Google location looks good enough. This then gives it a bold green tick in a green circle!! Marked as user verified data. In theory you could filter on the things that aren't ticks and work your way through them checking and verifying them. Or even clicking to edit and then moving the marker yourself. This is especially interesting if you use the Bing OS maps or the historic OS maps to find the farm house your ancestor lived in. Note the OS is great for rural locations and not so great in towns/cities.

So you can if you want to spend time on it improve the data Google finds and so improve the various map display functions.

The new Places feature in version 3.3.0.0 due out soon will allow you to browse through a tree of your locations and see them and who lived there plotted on a map. It allows you to discover various branches of your family living close together that aren't related but might provide a clue to where to look for a link.

 

Sent.

 

The limit is per user. Error 500 are internet connection issues. Something weird was going on.

I'd wait till the next day and give it another go.

 

Ok, have a good night's sleep!