Thanks for the link to the documentation. That’s exactly what I was looking for.

With regards to the GPS data what I’m after is “ground truth” for a handful of addresses in NZ. I want to compare the “truth” with what the geocoders give me back. If you’re interested in taking your GPS with you next time you go downtown, I’d love a few lat/long pairs and their corresponding addresses. If you can, please email me (cam#googlemapsbook.com) before you go as there are a few tips that will help make the measurements optimal.

The Geodetic database is probably very interesting and useful, but right now it’s giving me an error. I’ll try again shortly.

I haven’t really worked with the Zoomin’ API, I just had a bit of a play with addresses and they were quite good. I just did some more inquiries using addresses from NZ Yellow Pages and queried them in Google Maps and Zoomin. In bigger towns and cities, they seem to both do a good job (both pinpointed my house in Christchurch extremely accurately), but in smaller villages in more rural areas, Zoomin seemed to be more complete. But these are VERY preliminary findings…

As to the geocoding API from Zoomin: The website is quite unstructured and I couldn’t find any info initially, either, although I was sure I had seen it before. A visit of their blog helped me along the way and here’s the link to the API documentation.

You’re asking about GPS ground data from NZ (I can’t really speak about Australia, sorry!). What kind of data are you looking for? I am personally collecting GPS-data on my backcountry trips (which I use for the maps on tramping blog. And through my job (in the broad field of GIS) I have some access to GPS data from (mainly) the South island of New Zealand.

Land Information New Zealand’s Geodetic Database is worth a look if you’re after GPS points. It contains the coordinates of thousands of survey marks throughout New Zealand.

Thanks for the compliment. I’m glad you liked the sample chapters. We tried very hard to make this a book that would be useful for programmers and not be a fad cash grab. A book where the fundamental principles wouldn’t be out of date any time soon. We hope that’s what people are finding.

Also, does zoomin have a proper geocoding API? One that can handle street addresses? If so, I haven’t been able to find it and it would be very useful for another tool I’m hoping to release in the next few weeks.

Lastly, do you have access to any GPS ground data in Australia or NZ?

I just noticed that announcement when I detected a remarkable increase in traffic to my outdoor-adventure blog “Kiwi Tracks” on Blogger, since they mentioned my blog in the announcement.

So far, we had pretty good geocoding through http://www.zoomin.co.nz but I’m glad that Google got down here now, too. I’ll have to check the accuracy, but if it’s good, there will be heaps of applications.

BTW, I just read over the two sample chapters of your book available on the web and I have to say that I like it. I’m definetely gonna buy a copy! It’s way more practical than the other Google Maps books around (and not based on the antiquated v.1 of the API).
Also thanks for the post on shapefile-display. That’ll prove useful in the near future…

Now we’ll have to find some cool address data for down under. It looks like the gov’t resources are pretty rich, but that’s mostly already in lat/lng.