Data Science Toolkit is a very original resource which provides free access to various valuable data like:
- street address to coordinates
- ip address to coordinates
- file to text (converts PDFs, Word docs, Excel spreadsheets to text)
- and much more.
These data can be reached via the API provided or every part of it is offered as a ready-to-install VM (virtual machine) where you can install to any server (or locally) for limitless API usage.
The API is REST with JSON results + there are also command line, Python and JavaScript interfaces.
Also, besides the VM, an EC2 AMI is ready for instant deployment to the Amazon's cloud.
Detecting the city or country of a website visitor is an essential point in offering location based web services or content.
Loading the related language version of the website, showing different banners to visitor from foreign countries and even blocking visitors from certain locations are some examples.
IP information is the most accurate data in determining a visitor’s location.
MaxMind, a company which is one of the best in geolocation services, offers country and city IP database for free besides the paid versions. The difference between free and the paid versions are the accuracy level as free versions are updated once every month rather than every week. With a small mistake margin, they may provide what you need.
Country and city IP data comes in two versions: binary & XLS. Open source binary APIs are avaliable for PHP, Perl, Ruby & other popular languages.
