Acquire Locations
ScaleUp! Community, previously we wrote about geolocation and geofences. Both technologies are useful for any digital health application. A mobile application, iOS or Android, will monitor a users’ location or their entry and exit from geofences. However, in order to utilize these technologies, you need to know the definitions of the geofences you wish to monitor or the locations of interest for your app. What is the best way to acquire locations of interest for your app? There are 2 main APIs available for this purpose: Google Places API and OpenStreetMap’s Nominatim.
Google Places
Google Places is the best source for location information – the quality and quantity of the information is excellent. However, the API comes at a cost, plus the pricing scheme for Places is complex, which could lead to unexpected charges. If your application requires querying Places for the creation many geofences, it could lead to non-trivial costs – remembering that, for each geofence or location of interest you acquire initially, you will need to periodically requery for the data, to make sure the location data your app is leveraging is not stale.
Nominatim
Nominatum, on the other hand, is open source. The quality of the data is a bit inferior to Google’s, but is still very good. Building a simple application to query for a set of points of interest is simple and you can requery for these points of interest periodically, without cost. For any app looking to integrate location based logic, using Nominatim to programmatically define and periodically refresh your points of interest is a great way to go.
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Using Nominatum