Background:

I spent 18 months working for True Knowledge, a web startup based in Cambridge. True Knowledge’s core product is an Internet Answer Engine queriable in a bespoke query language via an API. This project re-implements the Steinberg algorithm (detailed http://numenore.co.uk/wiki/maps) in the True Knowledge query language and PHP.

Details:

The implementation in src/steinberg.tkql assumes a user is querying about a place. You want to provide information on the most likely location given the IP Address of the user and the place name they provide. For example if a user has an IP address indicating their in London UK, and queries “Cambridge” are they more likely to be referring to Cambridge UK, Cambridge MA or Cambridge NZ.

Possible places the user could be referring to are returned and relevant meta-data (latitude, longitude, True Knowledge unique ID, Population, Unique detailed description, thumbnail url, and distance from the user).

The query in src/steinberg.tkql assumes the variables $place_name and $ip_adr are assigned to the place name in question and the IP address of the user. The PHP snippet in src/snippet.php turns this into a relevance measure.