Database cleanup needed?

[Carolinaboy]

At times it seems like half of the wifi hits on here are cellular hotspots - the highways are full of it even out in the middle of nowhere! Perhaps remove everything that hasn't been reported more than once at the same approximate location if there are more than 2 reports near that area? That would also get rid of some of the old ids that are no longer in use at homes and businesses.

What's the point in historical data?

[arkasha]

WiGLE has a lot of different uses, including understanding the spread of WiFi over time and numerous historical and forensic applications - but if you're only interested in recent data, try setting the map date sliders and using the date ranges in the search forms and APIs!

Cheers,

-ark

[Carolinaboy]

Thank you, I'm aware of the date range adjustment - but from what I'm seeing there are a large number of non-stationary hits that almost certainly appear multiple times at different locations. These are cellular hot spots in moving vehicles. What possible reason is there to record the location of such things? They just clutter the maps.

[arkasha]

The maps display the signal-strength weighted trilaterated centroid of the observations for a point; it's an average location. This means each point appears only once in the maps, at roughly its average location. There's a lot more detail available in the API, and in the individual detail queries as well as when you select a result in Basic Search. We do some cluster detection and some standard deviation calculations to keep outliers from dragging points too far, but mobile devices will find their "center" according to where and how they're observed.