[Answered ]-Building a geospatial querying REST api

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I’m afraid you’re asking too many and general questions to get a useful answer. I’ll try:

If you want to do very simple geo-spatial stuff, try to stick to working with bounding boxes. the simplest technology that fits the problem is well worth exploring. However, you’ll probably find out soon you need more…

If you want to use geodjango, use a PostGIS database and forget the non-relational ones. You will be developing a back-end and it has a steep learning curve for a non-webapp programmer. Start with the geodjango tutorials, and gradually develop a technology stack you’re comfortable with (REST services will be easy enough with geodjango).

The reason for choosing a non-relational database is either very use case specific (you want to store documents, a graph, or you don’t want a predefined schema) or required for scaling purposes (concurrently read and write a lot lot of data, and therefore use multiple nodes, etc). If you’re a non-web app programmer, hire one with experience (who can do some ‘software architecting’) to help you on this path.

  • Should the location data be stored in a seperate table or the same table
    as other user data?
  • Should I use timestamps to invalidate old location updates or is
    there any better method for doing
    that?(for example the database could
    itself peridically delete location
    updates).

Ask someone who did any database design to help you. With the problem description so far, you could work with two tables: a User(id, name) table, and a UserLocation(id, timestamp, user_id, xCoordinate, yCoordinate) table. Than add a UserLocation row for every sample you get for a user. You can later design (and change) rules on interpreting the UserLocation table, like:

  • The latest UserLocation is the one which is valid
  • If the timestamp is older than 4 hours, it’s unusable
  • etc

From your line of questioning, it feels you’re a bit out of your league. However, if you can stick to simple technology and work pragmatically, you can get your service working. Why not start with mysql+php and bounding queries? And swap it for something else once you have everything else working?

👤ivy

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