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Amazon Location Service

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Re: Amazon Location Service

#71
post #70

Because I don't think a lot of people know about it, I'll mention pelias here. If you have 16 GB RAM and 600 GB of disk, you can have a free, open source, pre-populated geo database that covers the entire planet. https://github.com/pelias/pelias Pelias does geocoding (turns addresses, POIs, and administrative regions into coordinates), reverse geocoding (given coordinates, finds nearby POIs, addresses, neighborhood,…

Can it be run for a subset of locations on a subset of those memory requirements? For example, just North America?

Yes, for example the north-america docker project says "As a fairly large build, this will require significant resources to complete quickly. It can still run on a personal computer with 8GB+ RAM, but will take a while. It will require 300GB or so of disk space."

https://github.com/pelias/docker/tree/master/projects/north-...

(Building the db typically takes more resources than just running the services using the db.)

Re: Amazon Location Service

#72

Because I don't think a lot of people know about it, I'll mention pelias here. If you have 16 GB RAM and 600 GB of disk, you can have a free, open source, pre-populated geo database that covers the entire planet. https://github.com/pelias/pelias Pelias does geocoding (turns addresses, POIs, and administrative regions into coordinates), reverse geocoding (given coordinates, finds nearby POIs, addresses, neighborhood,…

Pelias is great, I ran it + open route service + a custom router all on one server for 30€ a month + a few other non maps related services. It made for a surprisingly coherent maps experience.

Re: Amazon Location Service

#73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tim Hortons in Canada is being probed for using Radar Labs in their mobile app. "Tim Hortons' parent company, Toronto-based Restaurant Brands partners with Radar Labs, a Brooklyn, N.Y.-based company , which provides location-based data analytics, and helps the Tims app to identify when users are near competing fast-food restaurants and coffee shops." https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-privacy-wat...

Heh, Burger King did that to offer $0.01 whopper coupons but I guess the difference is the app had to be in use and known to the user to recognize the location-- https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2018/12/04/burger-king-...

BK & Timmy's are owned by the same parent company. Hmmm.

Re: Amazon Location Service

#74
post #58

10x cheaper than Google (at least for geolocation). That's unexpected. GCP is usually cheaper than AWS.

Google Maps is really expensive compared to the other GIS providers. Amazon's just reselling those same services. Google seems to coast somewhat on the strength of their map (including the unique and very hard to replicate StreetView).

Re: Amazon Location Service

#75

I wonder if this is related to the recent shift of mapbox away from OSS. Was on page 1 in the last week. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25347310

From your link: As far as I know as someone who worked here for 7+ years (take this as personal opinion), Mapbox wants to keep investing heavily in open source and open data sustainably and indefinitely, and this GL JS change is an unevitable prerequisite for that. This may not be easily apparent at this moment but it will be soon.

I guess this is what he was referring to.

Re: Amazon Location Service

#76
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because then Amazon can't track all your users. Imagine a delivery company uses Amazon's API for its in-truck apps or route planning. Amazon drinks your data, it drinks it up.

Do you have a source for this assertion? I assuming the privacy policy or terms of use would have this spelled out fairly clearly.

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/23/wsj-amazon-uses-data-from-th...

Don't know why people are downvoting. This is SOP at Amazon. You want to blame me for Amazon's reputation? You want to blame cnbc? What the fuck, fuckers.

Re: Amazon Location Service

#77
AWS has been tip-toeing into the maps space for a few years with their hosted GIS data.

They have the infrastructure to create a very compelling imagery dataset from their combination of Amazon Air, and Amazon Prime Air (drone delivery).

Google flies planes to capture cities for Google Earth, but none of the other mapping companies are regularly capturing this data as part of their everyday business.

I know someone is going to say "yeah, but you have to fly vertical and horizontal paths across cities to capture all the data", but I think that is a current limitation which will be resolved with large amounts of data and ML/AI.

Re: Amazon Location Service

#78

Because I don't think a lot of people know about it, I'll mention pelias here. If you have 16 GB RAM and 600 GB of disk, you can have a free, open source, pre-populated geo database that covers the entire planet. https://github.com/pelias/pelias Pelias does geocoding (turns addresses, POIs, and administrative regions into coordinates), reverse geocoding (given coordinates, finds nearby POIs, addresses, neighborhood,…

Thanks for the mention John.

Co-maintainer of Pelias here so I'll chime in with some more background info.

Pelias came out of Mapzen which (sadly) shut down about 3 years ago, but we had a great team of people working on it for 4 years before that, and the project has continued to grow since then. We have contributions from my company, Geocode Earth, which I plugged in another thread so I won't repeat, other contributors like Jawg(https://www.jawg.io/), and of course individuals and teams from many other places.

The core architecture uses Elasticsearch, Node.js, SQLite and some Go to build a fully featured, modular geocoder.

Geocoding is both a fascinating and incredibly frustrating challenge so we are always looking for more people reporting bugs and contributing fixes or other improvements. We truly believe a quality geocoder can't be built outside the large bankrolls of Google, etc without growing a strong open-source community around it.

Re: Amazon Location Service

#79

Always great to have an alternative to Google but I'd encourage anyone to have a look at Leaflet.js which is a great free alternative and doesn't take much JS knowledge to get up and running Edited to say: and of course it runs on OpenStreetMaps

Mapbox GL 1.x is pretty good though, it's much faster and smoother, along with rotation and 3D support. It's under the same license too.

Re: Amazon Location Service

#80
post #5

Can I get satellite images? Only thing holding me back from switching completely from GCP to AWS for a couple projects.

You might be referring to very processed satellite images, but AWS has many more satellite/aerial data sources than GCP in their Open Data program [0]: https://registry.opendata.aws/sentinel-2/ [1]: https://registry.opendata.aws/sentinel-2-l2a-cogs/ [2]: https://registry.opendata.aws/landsat-8/ [3]: https://registry.opendata.aws/naip/

Those are way too low-res for typical satellite map usage, though. It doesn't even look to have a pixel/house resolution, even.
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