Hello and welcome. Who am I and what is this blog ? My name is Peter Schwarz, and I am the owner of Integrated Productivity Tools (henceforth – IPT) and host for this blog. The blog is intended to do three things: Make announcements regarding IPT products and other...
Address Geocoding and How It Works
Address Geocoding and How It Works Address geocoding can be defined as the process of obtaining geographical co-ordinates (latitude and longitude) for addresses and place names so that they can be mapped or subjected to location analysis. It works primarily by...
Enabling Location Analytics for Business
Eight Steps for Enabling Location Analytics for Business Data Part of the mission for my company is to provide the tools for non-experts to create professional quality geographic analysis products from their own data. Many business people and other organizational...
Geocode an Address in Map Posts
How to Get Map Address Co-ordinates Using Map Posts Free Integrated Productivity Tools released version 1.1 of it's WordPress plugin Map Posts Free yesterday. This tutorial provides a standard workflow for obtaining the latitude and longitude for an address, fine...
Location Mapping on WordPress
Associating a Blog Post Location with a Map Integrated Productivity Tools (IPT) is building a WordPress plugin that will allow authors to configure and add a map without ever leaving the post editor. Users can provide a location by manually entering latitude and...
That Don’t Look Right
QC Adventures in QGIS Last week my goal was to prototype one base feature layer and using the lessons learned to define a standard process for all other layers. Part of this task was to define quality control standards and identify candidate tools for their...
Web Mapping Services for QGIS and Leaflet
Offering the World The following is to some extent a continuation of my previous post. In addition to implementing my own styles and filtering I also wanted to investigate using web mapping protocols other then Tile Mapping (TMS – Tile Mapping Service). TMS is the...
On Nodes and Ways
OSM Data Structure This post presents a description of the OpenStreetMap (OSM) data structure and some implications for users. References are mostly from that organization’s wiki. What I intend to provide is: A short, precise definition of the data...
Drawing the World and Building It
Last week I continued in my quest to identify suitable data providers for my own application use. Because of the limited capacity of OpenStreetMap (OSM) and other free data servers to accommodate high request volumes I decided to investigate commercial vendors. What I...
This Data is Not for Sale
As a small business bringing new untested products to market, I have to be mindful of a capped budget and the need to minimize expenses. Therefore whenever I can acquire something for free I take it. In this way I’ve acquired software tools, templates, advertising and...
The World is not Flat
Introduction to Datums and Projections I wrote this post because there seems to be a lot of confusion among casual users of GIS and other mapping applications around projections. The three take-away lessons I would like to share are: Projections are a necessary...