CODEWITHSUNDEEP
geolocationgoogle-places-apireverse-geocoding
Rage
Rage

Reputation: 970

How to evaluate the remoteness of a location given its coordinates?

I need to be able to evaluate how remote a location is given its geographical coordinates. I rate remoteness based off of a few key metrics, so far, I am only able to calculate a subset of all the required metrics:

  1. The cellular reception at the given coordinate. More specifically, the density of cell towers around the coordinate. This can be found using opencellid.org.
  2. Elevation. This can be found using Google's Elevation API

How can one find these remaining metrics for remoteness?

  1. The type of natural feature the coordinate is in. (eg. Lake, River, Glacier, Ocean, Island, Mountain)
  2. Distance to the nearest road. (Google's Snap Road API and Nearest Road API only work if the coordinate is within 50m of a road, that will not work as some coordinates are hundreds of km from the nearest road).

Upvotes: 2

Views: 194

Answers (2)

Mike Q
Mike Q

Reputation: 7327

  1. What is the purpose I wonder? You could take a sampling of coordinates around the fix and if they are mostly on a hill or in water it is definitive, it seems people know how to figure out this kind of stuff with google apis.

  2. Would this be good enough? Get Lat/Lon and range from a sources like this: https://my.opencellid.org/dashboard/login?ref=opencellid for free. Use a formula to determine the distance between the gps locations like this: https://nathanrooy.github.io/posts/2016-09-07/haversine-with-python/. Then make your own determination on strength based on "range" and terrain. perhaps create a DB table of say 500 zip codes with label for terrain type rating. If 10 or something it's the worst terrain and you drop the strength by something that makes sense.

Upvotes: 0

Antonin GAVREL
Antonin GAVREL

Reputation: 11219

About land type

For your first question it has already been answered here, except it is only for land/water.

My approach would be the following:

Using maps static, you get the image at your coordinate, you get the pixel at the center of your image (your coordinates) and you use a hashmap/dictionary that contains all the different possible colors and their land type, would be very quick to implement. But you can find out different ideas by reading the first link provided.

For strength of cellular signal

As for your second question, you can use Google API to detect the closest cell towers object, using the locationAreaCode that you can obtain through the coordinates:

An example cell tower object is below.

{
  "cellTowers": [
    {
      "cellId": 170402199,
      "locationAreaCode": 35632,
      "mobileCountryCode": 310,
      "mobileNetworkCode": 410,
      "age": 0,
      "signalStrength": -60,
      "timingAdvance": 15
    }
  ]
}

Upvotes: 2

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