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Geographical Mapping of Website Traffic?

Posted by Cliff on from the where-do-your-hits-come-from? dept.

inputsprocket asks: "Having gotten into a project that involves doing some geo-statistic data mining analysis on Apache log files, I couldn't believe how there seems to be such a large chasm, in open source's vast library, for such a powerful analytical tool. Unless I'm wrong, then there is no such open source project available for *nix variants. There appears to be a great deal of brand software (heh — only for Windows off-site analysis though), yet there is are great open source tools for generic mapping tools (GMTs). The available GMTs seem to be overkill for mapping of weblogs and require a lot of in-house programming to map IP addresses to cartographic data using free geo-location databases. The closest I found was Palentir. Does one really have to rely on the powerful needs of Map Server, MapTools, Carto Web, or Map Builder to draw simple maps with statistics on web usage, given the extra programming needs required to do this? "To see what is possible, have a look at DeepMetrix's LiveStats.XSP — a commercial option, which isn't a problem. It's just a shame that it's only for Windows and for of-site browsing.

Somebody, please tell me there's more to open source geolocation of web traffic than Analog."

4 of 20 comments (clear)

  1. Try hostip.info by Space+cowboy · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I created the hostip.info website a couple of years ago which is an open-source geo-location system. I've since passed it to others to maintain.

    On their front-page right now is a geographic map of website traffic, which is a "public-beta" of a mapping system (upload IP addresses, get a map).

    They don't actually appear to give out the code (from only a quick look on the site, that may not be correct), but this ought to be pretty trivial to do yourself if you wanted... The public API of hostip.info returns the lat/long of any IP address it knows, and plotting lat/long on an image of the world ought not be too hard.

    I designed the whole system so you could download and set up your own geolocation database, slaved from the master at hostip.info with regular updates. Then you can query IP addresses locally and generate charts however/whenever you wanted...

    Just a thought,

    Simon

    --
    Physicists get Hadrons!
  2. NeXT by 2.7182 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I seem to recall that the NeXT machines that I used in the 90's could do stuff like this with some piece of software. Anyone recall the name ?

  3. Azureus by slim · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Azureus can display the location of your peers on a world map.

    That's Open Source -- so look at their source.

  4. phpmyvisites by inputsprocket · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Replying to my own question, but I think I found the most complete OS project out there for geolocation log statistics....

    I've been playing with phpMyVisites and it looks a very nice and thorough implementation of what I was looking for.

    Although it's method for country geolocation is a bit *cough* rough, I think a module to hook into Space Cowboy's hostip.info shouldn't be too difficult...

    The only problem with it is it uses mysql to store the logs *grrrrr*

    OpenLayers looks slick!