Geolocation with GoogleMaps

[pedro-gutierrez]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

At the moment the toolbox exposes the Address type which captures detailed information about addresses, but we are missing latitude and longitude information.

Describe the solution you'd like

Ideally we would need to:

1. Given an address, find its latitude and longitude coordinates by querying Google's geolocation APIs.
2. Mutations to let the user manually adjust a given address coordinates, if for any reason google's data is not accurate or simply not available.

[coderbyheart]

Why not use https://what3words.com/? That's easier to transmit (even orally) compare to two floats.

[bion]

Another option is open location codes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Location_Code

Like what3words they're also easier to share than coordinates. A few other nice things about them:

• can be converted to coordinates offline without a special app
• there are open source libraries for doing that conversion (here's one for TypeScript we could use client-side)
• can be copy/pasted directly into google maps (more info: maps.google.com/pluscodes)
• easy to get from google maps
• don't require the user to speak english

[coderbyheart]

That's even better, I like that it does not required a lookup table.

• don't require the user to speak english

W3W has translations: https://what3words.com/news/blog/what3words-voice-is-now-available-in-over-20-languages/

[pedro-gutierrez]

I am not familiar with all this. Do you know if it is possible to leverage existing database extensions (eg postgis) in order to implement features such as #25, if we don't store actual coordinates?

[coderbyheart]

The good thing with OLC is that they can be converted directly to latitude and longitude.

[coderbyheart]

That said, I think the underlying location data (e.g. for groups), should always be lat/lng, but when showing this information to the user, with the intent of being shared, use OLC.