Add radius to data search

[tsujigiri]

To improve the quality of the search results as well as the performance, the data search should take a radius.

[tsujigiri]

I'm currently working on the internal part of this. Until somebody comes up with an idea how to fit this additional field into the search form, it will be fixed at 100 km.

Wouldn't it be possible to achieve a radius from a geolocation-service?
I could imagine to geolocate a name and recieve the size of the given map-clip. I'll do some research on that.

[tsujigiri]

Just to let you know what we have so far: We use geokit-rails3 to display the results sorted by distance. With that it is easy to additionally limit the lookup to a certain radius. Though, it would for sure be more convenient to know how large the area is, that has been searched for. I already started to setup PostGIS in a separate branch, but I didn't want to put it into master, as I was afraid, that it may be daunting to some developers, having to set that up on their local machines . Also we would still need to put the geo-data into it by ourselves. So, using some service for that is certainly a good idea.

That's interesting - thanks Tsujigiri. I currently found out that the Google-Maps geocode-API seems to deliver an additional viewport (as a geo-rect) with their results. I'll have a look in GeoNames, too.