Physical distance between two places

Question

I need to measure the physical distance between two places whose names are provided as strings. Since sometimes the names are written slightly differently, I was looking for a library that could help me measure the difference and then combine it with a measure of the latitude and longitude to select the correct matches. Preferred languages: Java or PHP.

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

Have a look at the Levenshtein distance. This is a way of measuring how different two strings are from one another.

Hopefully I understood your question correctly; using "distance" in the same sentence as "latitude and longitude" could be confusing!

Answer 2

Although written in c (with python and tcl bindings), libdistance would be a tool for applying several distances metrics on strings/data.

Metrics included:

• bloom
• damerau
• euclid
• hamming
• jaccard
• levenshtein
• manhattan
• minkowski
• needleman_wunsch