MAP Locator Service

MAP Network Engineering provides a map based locator service that can be added to a customers WWW site.

What is a locator service?

For any operation that has retail outlets located in many places, their customers often have the question, "where is the nearest one?" A locator service is any service that can provide the answer to that question. Many sites today have a simple locator service that requires the customer to scroll through a list of locations to select the one they are interested in. Often this doesn't work well since they may need to go through listings for several surrounding towns to find the right outlet.

How does the map based service work?

With a map based locator service, the customer is presented with a map of the coverage area and can select a location (or region) of interest, and the service will then show the locations, both on the map, and as a ranked list.

Availability

The software consists of several C language source files. The source will compile on most UNIX systems. No experience with non-UNIX systems has yet been reported to me, but the code is sufficiently generic that this shouldn't be hard. The code is known to run under several UNIX HTTP servers using the CGI specification. Complete source code, build instructions, and a Makefile are supplied.

The software for this service is available at several levels of support:

as-is: You would be given a copy of the current operating base-line code for your customization. This would require you to have a programmer to do the customization for your site, and have someone enter and maintain the database. The existing code base runs on most systems, some porting help is included. Includes copies of updated source for a period of one year. Extended source updates available.
Ready to go: The software would be customized to your site's requirements and supplied ready to be operated on your server. The software will require you to have someone enter all the location data into a simple text file to configure the system for operation.
turn-key customize it to your specification as above, plus entry and setup of the initial database. The service is provided as a complete turn-key solution for your site.
operate the service for you on a contract basis. This can include presentation in the generic locator service, if desired, at no additional charge.

An additional, optional, service that may be added to any of the above (included in operate) is registration on the MAP-NE server to have your locations listed on the generic locator service operated by MAP Network Engineering.

It is also possible to submit data for the generic locator service without a separate customized server.

In addition, ongoing maintenance/service contracts can be arranged on a prepaid or time and materials basis.

If you have any questions about this service, or need additional information, please contact us and we'll do our best to answer all questions and they will help fix the page to make it clearer to future readers.

MAP Network Engineering

MAP Network Engineering main page contact us.
[Routing] [DNS] [Growth planning] [Training]
Services for: [Content providers] [ISPs] [Corporate nets]

Note: If you bookmark us, we recommend using the main page. That is the only URL guaranteed to remain stable.

This page was served from an old server at MIT. You should update any references (or inform the maintainer of the referring page) to the new URL: http://map-ne.com/loc.html. Further pages (and, indeed, reloads on some browsers) should be automatically transferred there.