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Comment by ckastner | Hacker News Reader

> In under 30 minutes we migrated our code to Stadiamaps without prior knowledge of their API, including deployment.

This surprised me. I'm completely ignorant with respects to geoinformation providers, but for some reason, I somewhat expected vendor lock-in to be much tighter.

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Geo coding took longer as the meta information about city districts etc. which needs to be mapped is different, but changing maps was easy. That said Open Cage was nice as their data was cleaner and we didn't have to manually change data as we had to do with Google.

OpenCage (https://opencagedata.com/) founder here if anybody has questions. Putting country hierarchies in a set of keys is a challenge for all geocoders and the output differs slightly (though we have a google-compat mode). Sometimes it's just road vs street or town vs city. England has parishes, Paris has arrondissements (equivalent to a city within a city), Berlin is a city, county and state (same outer boundaries) for example.

FAQ has:

>Just pass the coordinates as a latitude and a longitude, separated by either a comma or a (URL encoded) space and the API will automagically work out that you want to reverse geocode.

Is the reverse geocoding based on 1. government-source boundary data, or 2. proximity to tagged points from OSM or other non-authoritative sources?

Both where government provides open boundary data, though in most cases that would've been imported into OpenStreetMap already https://opencagedata.com/credits

They probably have a nicely decoupled code and not too complex an integration. If you're just showing some icons on the map, all you need to know is where to place them on the overlay layer and then query and set the bounding box for the map. That's pretty much it. The rest can be in your own code.

Exactly.

The core principles of geoinformation are the same across providers. Here is a map which is functionally geographic locations in specific locations, you place your own special bits in "layers" on the top. Leaflet.js is a great example of a library that works pretty much the same regardless of which provider you choose.

The competitive set is differentiated in some of their niche work (like specific-device-embedded maps, such as the ones in Tesla), but the first principles for the common developer are all the same.

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