Geoexplorer

Geoexplorer is a framework meant to be used for black-box-testing and/or scraping data from geographic services like Google Places and Foursquare.

Full documentation both for developers and users can be found in the doc folder of the project. The full API is there as well.

Install dependencies

Ubuntu 13.10

Works out of the box.

Ubuntu 12.04

sudo apt-get install python3 python3-lxml

Windows 7

1. Download and install python3.2 from http://www.python.org/download/releases/3.2.5
2. Edit windows path
   • Go to Control Panel > System > Advanced system settings
   • Click the Environment variables.. button
   • Edit PATH and append ;C:\python32\
3. Install the lxml3.2 from http://pypi.python.org/pypi/lxml/3.2.4

Usage

1. Run python3 examples/<example>.py substituting <example> with one of the example files
2. Open GUI/index.html with a webbrowser to see live what is going on

Some services like Google Radar require an API key. You can edit that by adding it in the source (ie. examples/google_radar_search.py).

Once running, a folder called log will be created at the current directory. This folder with be populated with log files on-the-fly. These can be used to debug the search and see the results.

Configuration

The config.py keeps all the applicable options for Geoexplorer in a single file. Each option is described bellow:

  GUI_PORT                -> Port being used for the communication with the
                             GUI
  
  LOG_PATH                -> Folder name where logs should be stored
  LOG_SCANNING_FILENAME   -> Name of file for logging scanning steps
  LOG_SESSION_FILENAME    -> Name of file for logging statistics fom each
                             scanning session
  LOG_RESULTS_FILENAME    -> Name of file for logging every single result
  NEW_FOLDER_EACH_SESSION -> Should a new folder be created on each scanning
                             session?
  
  BOUNDS                  -> The coordinates lat, lng, lat2, lng2 for
                             scanning. 
  
  'box'
  X_DISTANCE              -> Desirable distance in m. for a box' x axis
  Y_DISTANCE              -> Desirable distance in m. for a box' y axis

  'scheduler'
  NEXT_SEARCH_WAIT        -> Seconds to wait before going scanning next box

The 'service' entry (not shown above) is used as a template by the services and should not be altered.

Logging

There are three files for logging different things.

  SESSION:  Different statistics for the whole scanning session
  SCANNING: This is the main debugging log file. Every scanning step is recorded
            in this file.
  RESULTS:  This keeps all the results extracted during the scanning session

Troubleshooting

The map in the GUI doesn't show any boxes.

A. Try to install the latest firefox web browser. The GUI will not work for old browsers(IE8 for example).