Malaysian maps and a geographic locations API … kind of

March 3rd, 2011 | by Sean |

I’ve been wanting to add some Malaysian mapping facility to spider.my for some time. I often go to JUPEM’s website – the “Department of Survey and Mapping Malaysia” to see what they have to offer. I’m invariably sorry when I do that – their website takes forever to load and doesn’t work properly in Firefox, it has been developed for Internet Explorer. What I really want is simple API access to their data. They have a ‘Map Explorer’ served using compressed SVG files and viewed in an Adobe SVG viewer component for Internet Explorer (doesn’t work at all in Firefox). That looks OK (if I start up VirtualBox, an old copy of WinXP and Internet Explorer), but I don’t want presentation, I want data.

Spider.my map feature
Spider.my map feature showing location of Pulau Kapas in Malaysia

I notice that the UK’s Ordnance Survey has a free public API – exactly what I expect from JUPEM! I sent them an email from their ‘feedback form’ asking for it and remain optimistic. In the meantime I wrote my own API just so I can get a few noddy projects off the ground. I know I can use Google or Bing Maps to do this sort of thing, but it strikes me that national geographic data is precisely the kind of thing we have governments and pay tax for. I am already paying for this data and do not want to consume product placements or spam for a chance to look at it!

Have a look at the spider.my Geographical Place / Location API and tell me what you think. It has plenty of ‘issues’ – how could it not, given its provenance? I could improve it / extend it further, but it appears to me that that’s someone else’s job. If you’d like to use it, feel free.

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