I have looked into Geopy and googlemaps (http://py-googlemaps.sourceforge.net/) and they both do not work for Chinese addresses. My app is stored on the Google App Engine. What I want to do is to parse a file containing addresses of restaurants in Hong Kong, and then Geocode the addresses and store the Lat and Lng in the datastore. How do I do this?
A:
I am not sure the API provides geocoding in China. Are you also saying that even with the google maps interface you can not get the geocoding to work. If that is the case then you better try to move on to a different service since there is quite a bit of functionality in the gmap website that is not in the API. So if the website doesn't work it is probably a darn good bet the API won't work.
TheSteve0
2010-03-17 06:59:05
To add to the above comment, the Terms of Use of Gmaps is quite restrictive. You might want to give their ToU a good read.
Mikos
2010-03-17 07:31:02
yeah I didn't even want to go there. I am quite sure that keeping the points in your own private datastore is againt the TOS
TheSteve0
2010-03-17 15:25:56
A:
Try the Chinese language version of GoogleMaps ditu.google.cn. It is better than the China coverage in the English Google Maps (at least it was a couple of years ago when I last looked into it).
Be aware that the Chinese government restricts foreign use of GIS data, so there may not be a good geocoding solution available if you are based outside China.
MarkJ
2010-03-18 11:46:39