Yet Another Perl-Powered Company: Geolytica
Jan 16, 2025 by Ervin Ruci
The database contains road names, shapes, numbers, zip/postal codes, city names, regions, neighborhood/district names, and more—billions of named location entities worldwide. Add another 100 million points of interest extracted from billions of webpages, and the problem becomes quite difficult.
At Geolytica, we harness Perl to manage and enhance vast geo-location datasets and build the application logic of the geocoding engines powering geocoder.ca and geocode.xyz.
We continuously update and enhance our location entities database, because ground truth changes - at the speed of life. One standout example is our work with OpenStreetMap’s POI data. A year ago, we utilized an in-house AI tool, (let’s call it “PerlGPT,”) to refine this dataset, correcting inconsistencies and enhancing data quality. The results were significant enough to share with the community at Free POI Data.
The beauty of Perl lies in its backward compatibility. Despite our codebase spanning over two decades, upgrading Perl across versions has never broken our code. In contrast, with other languages, we’ve observed issues like API changes causing extensive refactoring or even rewrites. Perl’s design allows for seamless integration of old and new code, which is vital for our specific needs.
