[GraphHopper] Get Street name and Town name of a GPS point

[Thomas Ferris Nicolaisen]

On Fri, Nov 29, 2013 at 9:50 AM, Maxime Guyon <gmaxi17 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hello,
>
> I want to know if it's possible to get the name of the street corresponding to a GPS point and if it's also possible to get the corresponding Town of the street.

I believe this is called "reverse geo-coding" [1].

As far as I know, it's a process that requires doing a lot of indexing
of coordinates (i.e. storage), so it's a task unfit for doing on a
mobile device, depending on the size of the area you want to index.

For the same reason, a lot of companies offer reverse-geocoding
services, including the developer of GraphHopper [2].

> If it's not possible, can you just indicate me a good way to implement this?

If you want to run this offline on an Android device (not sure if
that's something you need), it sounds very difficult. Most indexing
tools like ElasticSearch target powerful server-side environments.
It's definitely possible, but sounds like a lot of effort.

I would just go along with one of the services for the time being.
You'll have to see which one of them suits you the best, regarding
usage, API, pricing, etc, but many of them are free for basic use.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_geocoding
[2] https://github.com/graphhopper/geocoder