[thelist] Proximity/Radius searching?

[Roger Ly]

>"The price packages for the MapPoint Web Service will vary based on the
>level of functionality and the volume of transactions.  They are currently
>based on a Standard Platform Access Fee of $8,000 or an Advanced Access Fee
> (includes driving directions) of $15,000.  Both Access Fees include
>500,000 transactions.

Peter,

If you want to take raw data and import it yourself into your own database,
you can use the Tiger/LINE data available by the US Census Bureau at
http://www.census.gov/geo/www/tiger/.  It has a bunch of raw data (which you
will need to parse out) which maps streets and street numbers to zip codes
and lat/long ranges.  

With this data, you can do a search for a valid street address, and find its
corresponding location in lat/long.  And best of all, its free!

It has a ton of data (about 650MB dumped in MySQL, in my case) but it offers
a lot of flexibility.

The drawbacks are that you still need to write a fairly straightforward
algorithm to do your range queries.  I have seen algorithms written in Perl,
etc., but haven't been able to find code in Java (which is why I had to
write my own).

Roger