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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."

11 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. perl and cpan are the answer by stry_cat · · Score: 2, Informative

    Like most things, just use perl and a cpan module. Apache2::Geo::IP

  4. Google? by CodeMonkey22 · · Score: 4, Informative

    Google Analytics does a decent job of this. I wonder if they have an API you could hit against it...

  5. 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.

  6. ip2location by Utopia · · Score: 2, Informative

    http://ip2location.com/ is the best database out there.

  7. OpenLayers.org, OSGeo Foundation and GeoRSS by Lord+Satri · · Score: 2, Informative

    I don't know the answer, but I can direct you to OpenLayers.org and to the Open Source Geospatial foundation to look for answers. I'm interested to the answer because we want to geolocate visitors for slashcode itself, and I copied your question on Slashgeo.org, which may help attract more answers to this /. story.

    While your at it, GeoRSS is also open and, in my opinion, the future of RSS. Learn more about it here.

    --
    Animoog.org
  8. Invented On Slashdot by Doc+Ruby · · Score: 2, Informative

    As seen on Slashdot: Map-O-Net maps IP#s on a fractal-ruled IP#-space map, including geography and orgs.

    --

    --
    make install -not war

  9. Perl Module Geo::IP and MaxMind Database work ... by xmas2003 · · Score: 3, Informative

    A while back, I wrote a quick little Perl script to do geolocation and other misc. info - see the page for more info, but it uses the free Perl Module Geo::IP and the MaxMind database. The free version of the later used to only provide country data, but they now provide lat/long and city info ... seems reasonably accurate, although with all of these things, the results can sometimes be way off.

    So with that, it wasn't too hard to write another Perl script that parses the IP address from the Apache logs, acquires misc. geolocation info, and then dumps out the lat/long data in Javascript for the Google Maps API - see this graphically shown on my christmas maps page.

    --
    Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
  10. Azureus-RIAA. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

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

    Thanks

  11. 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!