Online map locator api like GPS

Google maps, ip location etc. working good.

But none of the services are locating a computer exactly where it is on a map.

Anyone know any api which can locate a 开发者_Go百科computer on a map without user inputs.

I am tired of ip location, it is not at all exact and my client is not happy. :(

Thanks Gobi

What you're trying to do is not possible without specialized hardware. Google maps on cell phones without GPS uses cell tower station information. Most other phones use actual GPS receivers. With neither of those, the only way for your network-attached computer to tell where it is is by looking at who owns its IP address, which is what the IP location stuff does. Unfortunately, that database has pretty low geographical resolution. If you really want accurate and precise location information, you have to have a GPS receiver.

This cant be done unless you have some GPS device connected to the computer. But I guess it is forbidden in the licence to use real time tracking in Google Maps, but I might be wrong.

There's one more way, but I don't know how practical it is: visible wifi networks. If your PC has wifi hardware then you can often correlate the list of networks that you can see to an approximate location based on databases of networks and position. This is how e.g. iPod touches can locate themselves, and iPhones when there's poor GPS reception in built-up areas.

But even if your end-user has wifi hardware and you can somehow read the network list from it then I'm not sure if there are public datasets for this though.

The W3C Geolocation API allows websites to request the user's best available location from the browser. In some cases this will use IP geolocation which you've already seen to be inaccurate, but it can sometimes do better.

The API is agnostic to the device and the method used to obtain location; on an iPhone, the Geolocation API may use cell tower triangulation, available WiFi network lookup or GPS satellite geolocation, or some combination. On Firefox or Chrome on the laptop, Google uses WiFi networks and IP address to give a location which is often much, much better than IP geolocation alone.

If you had a GPS attached to your computer, it's possible that your browser could take advantage of that too -- it's expected that future versions of Internet Explorer will support the W3C Geolocation API using the Windows 7 Location Platform, which can accept location from an attached GPS or manual entry or some other plugin.