Skyscript Astrology Forum

Posted: **Wed May 04, 2016 8:39 pm**

Hello everyone,

lately I've been needing an easy to use atlas that could give me the geographical positions of locations, the timezone and the UTC offset for a given date and time. There are some paid solutions out there, and free solutions such as the geonames database have almost all the information that I needed but no information about utc offsets.

Therefore, I decided to roll my own solution and created a web service that returns that information. The location information is based on the geonames database and the utc offset information is based on the olson database.

The webatlas can be found in this link: http://webatlas.flatangle.com/

Here's an example with the results for all locations starting with "Lis" on a given date and time:

Jo?o Ventura

Posted: **Wed May 04, 2016 9:47 pm**

That's really, really helpful. Thank you!

Posted: **Thu May 05, 2016 1:43 pm**

Thanks Astraea!

Btw, made some changes to the style, and added tooltips to the latitude and longitude values. So, when you move the mouse over any lat/lon value, it shows the value as decimal. It may be useful since some software use this..

Jo?o Ventura

Posted: **Thu May 05, 2016 2:44 pm**

I agree with Astraea, it looks really useful. Thank you.

Posted: **Thu May 05, 2016 4:41 pm**

thanks joao

it might come in really handy for me from time to time.. thank you!

Posted: **Fri May 06, 2016 3:23 pm**

Added another feature: If you move the mouse over a location name, it now opens a tooltip with the map. Since some locations may share similar names on the same country, it allows us to be sure which location is which.

The maps are 100% functional google maps, including zooming and panning..

Jo?o Ventura

Posted: **Fri May 06, 2016 3:41 pm**

Wow! These features you've added are wonderful - especially the map tool, it adds a nice dimension of context to the data.

Posted: **Fri May 06, 2016 8:48 pm**

Jo?o,

I was going to do this with the Terran Atlas a couple of years ago, but Google wanted a $10,000/year annual fee. Did they change their policy?

Posted: **Sat May 07, 2016 11:00 am**

Hi Curtis,

I have the idea that the Web APIs have always been free up to a certain number of requests. For instance, the Google Maps JavaScript API (the one I'm using on this project) is free up to 25.000 requests per day.

https://developers.google.com/maps/pricing-and-plans/

I wish I had that number of requests daily!

Jo?o Ventura

Posted: **Sat May 07, 2016 3:36 pm**

jventura wrote:Hi Curtis,

I have the idea that the Web APIs have always been free up to a certain number of requests. For instance, the Google Maps JavaScript API (the one I'm using on this project) is free up to 25.000 requests per day.

https://developers.google.com/maps/pricing-and-plans/

I wish I had that number of requests daily!

Jo?o Ventura

Thanks Jo?o. Looks like I was partially mis-directed. I created a Windows app around 2011 that required a Google Developer account and it works nicely and wanted to expand it to include astrocartography, but when I asked if it was OK to use my developer account, they said no, that I required a business license because it would be inside of a paid application:

If the maps you produce will not be freely and publicly accessible to your customers, or within a mobile app (paid or unpaid) in a public apps store, you will require a Google Maps API for Business license. Many businesses choose to procure the Business edition of Maps, because of the limitations of free Maps API. The Business license has key features such as an SLA, Technical Support, and higher geocode limits (100,000/day for premier version compared to 2,500/day for free api). The Enterprise license also provides the ability to control advertisements.

Pricing for the Business license starts at $10,000 per year for the Standard Edition and $20,000 for the OEM (Reseller) Edition. We do not currently have a solution less than the $10k entry level.

I also ran into a roadblock because I was planning to do astrocartography but ran into this legal issue:

10.1.3 Restrictions against Data Export or Copying.

(a) No Unauthorized Copying, Modification, Creation of Derivative Works, or Display of the Content. You must not copy, translate, modify, or create a derivative work (including creating or contributing to a database) of, or publicly display any Content or any part thereof except as explicitly permitted under these Terms. For example, the following are prohibited: (i) creating server-side modification of map tiles; (ii) stitching multiple static map images together to display a map that is larger than permitted in the Maps APIs Documentation; (iii) creating mailing lists or telemarketing lists based on the Content; or (iv) exporting, writing, or saving the Content to a third party's location-based platform or service.

In other words, they didn't want astrological glyphs and horizon / meridian lines "stitched" into their maps.

Of course since your situation is public, I see why you're able to do this.

Posted: **Sat May 07, 2016 5:59 pm**

I guess you're right! Since I'm using Google Maps on a free web application, I didn't bother to look into the details for commercial applications. But I can do the same reading as you do..

However, for commercial applications there seems to be alternatives with OpenStreetMaps (http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Frameworks#Webmaps).

For instance, Leaflet (http://leafletjs.com/) seem to use the tiles from a *.tile.osm.com server. But the osm.com guys do not want commercial applications retrieving map tiles from their servers (although they do not enforce anything), and suggest other providers (http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tile_usage_policy). Some of these seem to allow commercial applications with restrictions.

If you are still interested in that, you can try to check those links..

Skyscript Astrology Forum

WebAtlas - an atlas web service

WebAtlas - an atlas web service