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Joined: Nov 28, 2004 Posts: 532 Location: Warwick, UK
Posted: Sat Jan 01, 2005 2:03 pm Post subject: POI Database of European Town Centres?
[First posted in POI-Sync - but no takers so far. Maybe there's a wider audience here?]
On TomTom GO's street level maps, there is an option to navigate to a town centre. You simply input the town name again when it asks for street, and it displays the town name along with a little church icon.
TTG also comes with the Major Roads of Europe (MRE) on CD. In fact, it's much more than major roads, and includes a lot of UK-type B roads. BUT, in many cases, the town names are missing - even though the map shows all the roads which intersect at the town. For example, using MRE you would not be able to specify Warminster (in Wiltshire, UK) as a destination even though it shows the A36 and A350 which intersect there.
It seems to me that MRE would be much more useful - and would probably be sufficient for occasional trips to Europe without needing to buy the detailed maps of each country - if only there was a way of navigating to towns.
The town names and their locations (the ones with the little church icons) are clearly embedded somewhere in one of the binary-coded .DAT files which comes with the detailed country maps. Does anyone know how to extract them into a separate POI file which could be used with MRE?
Alternatively, does anyone know of any other source of town name/location data - preferably for UK and all of mainland Europe - suitable of being massaged into a set of POI Town databases?
Joined: Nov 02, 2004 Posts: 123 Location: Munich, Germany
Posted: Sun Jan 02, 2005 11:21 am Post subject:
rkm_hm, now this I do like the idea of! :D
There are many websites that could give you the lat/long coordinates of cities and towns anywhere in the world. I beleive it is possible to convert these into a POI file, although I've never tried it.
That would be a massive undertaking though, even for the UK let alone Europe.
Joined: Nov 28, 2004 Posts: 532 Location: Warwick, UK
Posted: Sun Jan 02, 2005 12:40 pm Post subject:
Sniff wrote:
There are many websites that could give you the lat/long coordinates of cities and towns anywhere in the world. I believe it is possible to convert these into a POI file, although I've never tried it.
Do you have URL's for any of these - and do they give you a heap of towns in one go, or one at a time. It's only really viable if they give all the towns in a specified area in a single operation. If it had to be done one at a time, a better way would be to use Autoroute on a PC and to create a named PushPin at the centre of each town on the map. The pushpins can then be exported and converted to POIs.
Whatever the origin of the data, if it can be got into a spreadsheet, or .csv file, with columns for lat, long and name, it's dead easy to create .ov2 POI files using freely available utilities.
I'm still hoping that someone will come up with a way of extracting town centre locations from the street-level TTG maps - they're in there somewhere!!
Some of these have lists that you could easily cut/paste into a spreadsheet, but none of them cover many cities or towns. The most comprehensive one is probably the 'heavens-above' site, but it woul dbe a chose to get all the data this way unless you could find some download utility.
Here's one that has exactly what you'd need...but it's a commercial site and they want several hundred dollars for the download
Joined: Nov 02, 2004 Posts: 123 Location: Munich, Germany
Posted: Sun Jan 02, 2005 2:57 pm Post subject:
Actually, I just found a fantastic new site that looks like it might contain exactly what is required! :D
It's free, already split into specific country regions, gives names of towns and cities and lat/long plus a bunch of other data, and is in a tab-delimited txt format file perfect for opening in Excel. Just perfect!
The UK download is a 1.03MB zip file and lists almost 32000 towns, cities and administrative districts. It would need a bit of column and row stripping but that should be easy enough.
Many thanks for this - it is an excellent source of data (but even so, my reference town of Warminster is missing!)
Even better from a data presentation point of view is the heavens-above site which you mentioned in your previous post. This has town and county - so if the same town name is repeated in different parts of the country (as is often the case) you can see which is which. The only drawback is that each search is limited to 200 results - so you can't use wildcards to get all the a's (A*), then all the b's (B*) - but need smaller subdivisions. I will give some thought to the question of how to get all the data with the least effort.
Posted: Mon Jan 03, 2005 3:16 pm Post subject: Town Centres
Thanks to all for posting those links for getting the long. and lat. co-ords of places. I've used multimap and find it very useful for UK and Europe.
Quote:
On TomTom GO's street level maps, there is an option to navigate to a town centre. You simply input the town name again when it asks for street, and it displays the town name along with a little church icon.
It does this for UK map as well. If you wish to navigate to a town and do not know any of the streets, I find TT-GO's 'list' of alternatives for the 'Streets' blooming annoying, if not useless!
Just put in the town again (as a 'Street') and it takes you to the 'Town Church' with it's little icon, as Roger mentioned for Europe maps. _________________ Cheers, Doc L.
Joined: Nov 28, 2004 Posts: 532 Location: Warwick, UK
Posted: Mon Jan 03, 2005 3:35 pm Post subject: Re: Town Centres
DocL wrote:
It does this for UK map as well. If you wish to navigate to a town and do not know any of the streets, I find TT-GO's 'list' of alternatives for the 'Streets' blooming annoying, if not useless!
Just put in the town again (as a 'Street') and it takes you to the 'Town Church' with it's little icon, as Roger mentioned for Europe maps.
I fear you misunderstood what I said!
I *know* that the UK maps do this - that was what I referring to as the "street level maps".
However, MRE *doesn't* do this - it doesn't know about the existence of many of the towns, despite knowing about the roads which go there. That's why I'm trying to find an alternative source of town centre POIs - so that MRE will be able to navigate to towns - which it currently cannot do, apart from the few which it *does* know about.
is this a generic POI set that you're looking for? or do you have a few towns you need for an upcoming holiday? I live in France and if you only need a few towns i could look them up on the detailed map, store them as poi's and email the ov2 file. Note my reference to a "few" towns though!!
Joined: Nov 28, 2004 Posts: 532 Location: Warwick, UK
Posted: Mon Jan 03, 2005 4:58 pm Post subject:
SGR1913 wrote:
rkm_hm,
is this a generic POI set that you're looking for? or do you have a few towns you need for an upcoming holiday? I live in France and if you only need a few towns i could look them up on the detailed map, store them as poi's and email the ov2 file. Note my reference to a "few" towns though!!
Many thanks for the offer, but it's a generic set I'm looking for. I can easily generate a few POIs myself by setting PushPins in MS Autoroute and then exporting the pushpin set and converting it to a .ov2 file.
What I'm setting out to achieve is to make MRE as useful as the detailed country maps for navigating between [any] towns (but not street level, of course).
All the necessary roads for what I want to do are there on MRE - but most of the town names are missing - hence the need for Town POIs.
Posted: Mon Jan 03, 2005 7:22 pm Post subject: Re: Town Centres
rkm_hm wrote:
I fear you misunderstood what I said!
I *know* that the UK maps do this - that was what I referring to as the "street level maps".
However, MRE *doesn't* do this - it doesn't know about the existence of many of the towns, despite knowing about the roads which go there. That's why I'm trying to find an alternative source of town centre POIs - so that MRE will be able to navigate to towns - which it currently cannot do, apart from the few which it *does* know about.
Whoops sorry! Thought you were just referring to European Street-Level maps.
I've not bothered with the MRE yet, so I didn't realize the 'missing towns' problem; does seem a bit daft to have fairly major towns un-designated. _________________ Cheers, Doc L.
Sorry, bumping this thread and slightly off-topic, just wanted to say: superb site - couldn't find out how to locate a town centre . Quick search on pocketgps - here it is! (And in several other topics). :D :D Many thanks.
PS generic European town centre POI would be very useful, unfortunately I can add no more to the info here.
I have found that the MRE map has quite a lot of names stored, including small towns and villages. You can navigate to them in the usual way but the names don't appear on the map itself.
It seems there may be some discrimination here between countries. In UK there are only larger towns and cities listed, while in Europe the level seems to go down to quite small villages. For instance, places I know in UK such as Tavistock in Devon and Retford (or East Retford) in Notts are missing, yet in Europe you can find villages that are just a few houses beside a road. Trahutten in SE Austria anyone?
Joined: Nov 28, 2004 Posts: 532 Location: Warwick, UK
Posted: Sat Jan 29, 2005 10:05 am Post subject:
sgould wrote:
It seems there may be some discrimination here between countries. In UK there are only larger towns and cities listed, while in Europe the level seems to go down to quite small villages.
That's very interesting!
I was trying to assess the usefulness of MRE for navigating in Europe, based on the level of detail of the UK part. Maybe this isn't a valid thing to do?
Looked a bit more. In UK the choice is a bit random.
My son was going to borrow the TTG to drive to L'Alpe d'Huez, French Alps, for snowboarding. That place is not listed, so he thought it would be no use and left it behind.
I played with it after he had gone and found that the village of Huez, a bit down the hill, is searchable even though it seems much smaller and the name also does not appear on the map. If you check on a paper map you can see that TTG shows the road (hairpins etc) all the way up to l'Alpe d'Huez. In that village the D211 meets the D25A which comes up the other side of the hill.
So, if you navigate to Huez and then choose D211 followed by "crossing" D25A, you can contrive to plot a route to L'Alpe d'Huez!!
A bit long winded, but you can do all this at leisure at home, in a few minutes, which is nothing compared to the possible time wasted if you get lost in a strange land in the dark at the end of a long tiring drive.
Even if you lose the setting by doing something else on the way, TTG will remember, and when you type in "Huez" the next time the correct road numbers will be top of the list of choices.
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. Quick search on pocketgps - here it is! (And in several other topics). :D :D Many thanks.
