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While I can't commit to helping out with code or resources at the moment, this sounds like a promising idea. To get something up and running, it could be worth
by jka 7y ago
While I can't commit to helping out with code or resources at the moment, this sounds like a promising idea.
To get something up and running, it could be worth searching the web for services and code that solve similar problems and starting with a proof-of-concept or draft version.
The solution sounds similar to a 'store locator' (like USPS / large retail chains provide); using that in some searches yielded the following:
- https://www.mapcustomizer.com https://www.mapcustomizer.com - this looks basic but allows plotting locations on a map and provides bulk entry, which could be performed and managed from a Google Sheet by a team
- https://batchgeo.com/features/store-locator/ https://batchgeo.com/features/store-locator/ - these folks specifically offer a service for building a store locator and they also provide geocoding (translating addresses -> latitude and longitude). It's not free but looks inexpensive -- at least for a small number of user accounts.
- [more advanced, would require self-hosting] Google have a tutorial on creating your own store locator using PHP and MySQL with Google Maps here: https://developers.google.com/maps/solutions/store-locator/clothing-store-locator https://developers.google.com/maps/solutions/store-locator/c...
- [most advanced, caveats apply] if building something from scratch, Solr geospatial[0] and leaflet.js could be starting points, along with something like uszipcode[1] to determine the user's origin long/lat to search-by-distance. Ultimately an approach like this risks sinking time into developing scripts and data processing that replicate what others already provide online as a service. It would provide more control over the experience and functionality however.
The concerns other commenters raise about false positives are valid - but it's likely that if such a service does become successful enough to produce noticeable test center foot traffic, the development team could communicate with those health services to update the messaging as-needed (or pause the service).
I'd encourage posting any data you collect and geocode to an open source repository in GitHub or elsewhere so that others could build related tools and/or contribute improvements and corrections back.
As an example of that approach: Johns Hopkins have been great at sharing the C19 global case data they're gathering[2] and at the time of writing there are 3.2k forks created from that dataset which is a good initial indicator of interest.
Good luck!
[0] - https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/SOLR/SpatialSearch#SpatialSearch-QuickStart# https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/SOLR/SpatialSear...
[1] - https://pypi.org/project/uszipcode/ https://pypi.org/project/uszipcode/
[2] - https://github.com/CSSEGISandData/COVID-19 https://github.com/CSSEGISandData/COVID-19