The Toronto Free-Net (TFN) needs a way to locating volunteers offering assistance and people who need assistance relative to major intersections within the Greater Toronto Ontario area.
The Toronto Free-Net (TFN) needs a way to locating volunteers offering assistance and people who need assistance relative to major intersections within the Greater Toronto Ontario area.
TFN views the Greater Toronto area of Ontario as being: from Hamilton in the west to Oshawa in the east, from Lake Ontario in the south to Barrie in the north.
TFN's technical support is accomplished by coordinating introductions between members willing to help each other: when a member has a technical problem, TFN seeks another member from its list of willing participants, one who is known to have previously solved that same problem or who has the prerequisite skill-set to solve that problem. Sometimes, solving the problem requires that one member visit another. The task of matching tasks to skills is already solved, but the geographical matching of members is currently a laborious task involving paper maps or manual use of on-line options such as Google maps. Coordinators may have only a dialup connection, which makes using web based solutions like Google maps almost impossible. Even with a high speed connection, having to enter the data manually, and then scroll around the map is a limiting factor.
TFN is looking for a command line application that would accept someone's postal address as input, such as:
"123 Main St, Toronto ON M2M 3J3"
and output a nearest major intersection and direction from that intersection, such as :
"S of Main & Gerard Street East, under 250 meters"
I.e. cardinal directions to a granularity of 8 horizon points (N, NE, E, SE, S, SW, W, NW) from the intersection to the inputted address, then the north/south street, as seen on local maps of the city, then the east/west street (fortunately the vast majority of streets in the greater Toronto area run basically north/south, or east/west with only a VERY small number of streets running on diagonals, we leave the handling of those few exceptions to the discretion of those involved with this project) . Including distance is a desirable, but not must have bit of information.
TFN is proud of its use of Free Software, so the solution must run on a Free operating system, such as GNU/Linux, and must NOT require a license for proprietary software. The solution must work from a command line, to facilitate automation.
Ideally, all data used by this program should be copyable to a TFN server, to improve response time and to minimize bandwidth consumption.