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 Münster (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.