Development of a Location Validation Web Service

Seminar paper from the year 2012 in the subject Computer Science - Internet New Technologies grade: 13 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 andstandardization 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.