We often have users that would like to use the maps app or the map widgets in Workshop or Contour but their data does not have geo coordinates (latitude and longitude) built in. It would be super helpful to have an out-of-the box solution to allow users to “translate” locations into coordinates. For example in Pipeline Builder for a column “address” a geo lookup could be automatically executed that returns a geohash or long and lat column as a result.
Workaround: As soon as egress policies are enabled on Python UDF functions, it would be possible to create such a service on each individual Foundry instance, but it would be much better if such a feature would be native to the Foundry platform.
I’ve had the best results solving this problem when the locations are very casually expressed by just asking LLMs for coordinates. For more complicated Geo stuff I’m sure dedicated services like Mapbox may be the best choice, but for our Use Case that needed to translate simple layman locations like “IPark Mall in Yongsan”, I found asking an LLM for the geo-coordinates to “IPark Mall Yongsan” to be the most reliably accurate.
This might vary depending on how well normalized your location data is, but it’s another option to consider.
I do think this is bad advice. LLMs are prone to hallucination and will make up answers. It’s also luck pure Luck if the location text and geolocation were part of the LLMs training data.
A first class mapbox integration would make the life of many low-code users better.