Development of a Location Validation Web Service

Seminar paper from the year 2012 in the subject Computer Science - Internet, New Technologies, grade: 1,3, University of Mnster (Wirtschaftsinformatik), course: Web Technologies Seminar, language: English, abstract: In many applications unverified data is processed, which often leads to inconsistence or errors.
Therefore the need for applications to validate this data is high. A lot of types of data can be
verified easily but more complex user data such as full-text-addresses pose a great challenge
towards validation.
This paper proposes an exemplary solution for such a validation by describing the development
of a web service that allows a research conference database 1 to validate conference-location-
strings. The validation consists of checking the plausibility of the location string, correction and
standardization of the spelling, classification (City, State, Country, etc.) and providing corre-
sponding data such as latitude and longitude. For this purpose, the web service accesses the
GeoNames database. Consequently, the conference database receives a rich response which it
can also use to provide further information, e.g., embedded maps or HTML5-Microdata-
Markup.