Geoexplorer : A framework for black-box testing and scraping information from geographic services.

Abstract: This is a report on the development of a free open-source framework. The framework is meant to be used to mainly black-box test and/or scrape information from a geographic service like Google Places, Facebook Places or Foursquare. In reality any service that is based on geographic coordinates can be used with the framewok. Amongst others, the framework offers functionalities like visualisation on-the-fly and logging of different aspects of the service. There are a few similar tools scattered on the world-wide web, but they usually are hard to find and if they are found, they either are not open-source, free or they lack in functionality. Another major drawback is that the available solutions are very generic, and thus limiting their capabilities. The work described here is an attempt for a concise, easy to use, extendible framework solely focused on geographic services. In this report, the technologies used are demonstrated, while at the same time the reasons are given as to why a specific technology was selected in each case. Some documentation is also presented and a few references to the actual code-base in case someone wants to extend Geoexplorer or use it at their organization.