Calculating in which country a coordinate is?

Question

Is there somewhere a base of polylines for download, I need polylines of european countries and a solution in php for calculating in which country a certain coordinate resides.

I used google maps api for this till now but it's too slow and I make many requests frequently so I need to do this locally.

Answer 1

Using the Google Maps API is a good solution because the data is already there and you have the code to use it.

However, a local solution would be to setup a spatial database and load it with the appropriate data. For an open source solution I recommend PostGIS running on PostgreSQL. You then need to find and load in the relevant boundary data. Searching for "world political boundary shapefile" or "europe political boundary shapefile" will give you some useful links to check.