Chinabites

Posted: Jul. 10, 2008

[edit: links have been deleted after site re-design]

I’ve been playing with some simple geospatial queries of the chinabites data for the past couple of days. Specifically I’ve made two views on the development server.  The first allows users to see the establishments closest to them (based on the location they set in their profile).  The second allows users to see what other locations are nearby a given restaurant, pictured below:

I’ve gone ahead and pushed the second view into production on chinabites.com and you can see an example of it here, or on any restaurant detail page under the maps tab.

The simple google maps interface for finding restaurants near a user’s location, however, was too inflexible.  The current 73 restaurants in the database can be comfortably displayed on a single map, so there’s no real advantage to just showing restaurants within a tiny radius of an individual user, all it does is remove information from the rest of the map.  I need to re-think the purpose of geospatial queries now that I’ve established that, yes, I can get them working with relatively little effort.

The problem that I think most travelers who come to Beijing will want to solve is: I’m at x hotel, show me what’s great to eat around here.  The next geo-spatial functionality that I develop for the production site will probably try and answer this question.  This will necessitate a new type of location, the Hotel, and quite a bit more data collection.

So what other location-aware functionality would be good to add to chinabites?  One other thought I had was an advanced query interface that would let users do queries like:

“Show me all of the restaurants within a 1 km radius of the Grand Hyatt, with sit down toilets, with a rating of 4.0 or higher.”

What do you all think?