Some other things that caught my fancy recently
This project provides tools to play with geographical data. It also works with non-geographical data, except for map visualizations :).
Glue is a Python library to explore relationships within and among related datasets.
On the current state of reverse geocoding:
At Flickr we spent a while working on turning the point where a photo was set on map (or whose GPS coordinates were shoved into the EXIF) into a place. The work of reverse geocoding is about taking a point, and finding out which polygon its in. This is a well solved problem. With two caveats:
places don’t have neat boundaries, but overlap all over each other. And people disagree about the overlaps
even if places had neat boundaries, and people agreed on them, availability of information about those boundaries is variable at best.
Once I made a request for a pure geo indexing capability. Ask and ye shall receive.
A Java reverse geocoder that uses Geotools and JTS to index Flickr Shapefiles to map (latitude, longitude) to WOEID.
The code has no external server dependencies and runs in memory. You may have to specify a larger max heap size if you use the largest files (e.g. the localities dataset uses around 450Mb on my Mac).