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In+ersec+ion for Spatial People

Free Batch Geocoding Service

posted by Satri on Monday January 23, @02:12PM   Printer-friendly   Email story  Permalink  Trackback URI  Slashdotthis  Diggthis  Del.icio.us
from the geocoding-community-code dept.
Geocoding Software
Phillip Holmstrand writes "I put together something that will allow anyone to run batch geocoding right from their web browser for free. It uses Yahoo's REST Geocoding engine, which will allow for up to 50,000 geocodes per day. The unique piece is that I have put it together so you can basically copy/paste straight from a spreadsheet into the tool to geocode. The results can then be copy/pasted right back into Excel for further use or imported into a database. It also plots the first 100 points on a map."

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PAGC: an OS Postal Address Geocoder is Released 1 comment [+]
Dan Putler writes "The PAGC project team is pleased to announce the first general public release of the Postal Address Geo-Coder (PAGC). Currently, PAGC is a command line program that takes a postal address database and determines the long/lat of the address in it by using a road network file (in ESRI Shapefile format) that has street address range information (such as US TIGER/Line and Canadian RNF files). PAGC is open source, and is released on the Lesser GNU Public License. You can find out more about PAGC (and obtain the program and documentation on how to use it) by going to the project's web site at http://www.pagcgeo.org/"
Batch Geocoding for Europe via Yahoo! REST Geocoding Engine [+]
Via Spatially Adjusted, I learned the BatchGeocode.com free tool now supports European countries: "Yahoo Maps Added Recently added support for geocoding in Europe. Now you can geocode and get map coordinates for these countries: Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Great Britain, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Ireland, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, France, and Italy. [other countries have limited support, see the blog entry]" See the previous story on BatchGeocode.com and other related stories below.
New Geocode Format with Short URL Service [+]
Anonymous Voxel writes "A new geocoding format and a web service which explores it have been made public yesterday at geohash.org.

According to the Wikipedia article, Geohashes offer properties like arbitrary precision, similar prefixes for nearby positions, and the possibility of gradually removing characters from the end of the code to reduce its size (and gradually lose precision). The algorithm has been put in the public domain, which is interesting, as Microsoft holds a patent on an algorithm with similar purposes." Added a few geocoding services below in related stories.
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  • I've used it

    (Score:2, Informative)
    by redgeographics (145) <hansNO@SPAMredgeographics.com> on Monday January 23, @02:21PM (#389)
    ( http://www.redgeographics.com/ )
    I used this the other day for some test data and I'm happy to report it works well. It did 300 records in about a minute or so. If I can nitpick for just a bit, I would like to see more option for column separation than just tab and | (like, for example, a comma). But that's just a very minor gripe.
    --
    Hans van der Maarel

    • Re:I've used it

      (Score:3, Informative)
      by Anonymous Voxel on Monday January 23, @04:07PM (#390)
      I messed with comma delimited early on. Its just a little tougher because comma delimited really means a comma delimited list that is also (or could be) qualified by double quotes, which means parsing not only the commas but the qualifiers. Still, I think I'll have it in there eventually.

      Tab delimited works great IMO because its the native format excel and most gridded forms in windows use for copy/paste. You can copy/paste straight into an access database even (just click the box in the upper left hand corner before you do.) It's funny but if you look at ESRI's guide to running a geocode in ArcMap there are like 10 or 12 steps. Mine has 6, and doesn't make you run anything heavier than a web browser, tee-hee. =o)

      Also having it access NAVTEQ and Tele Atlas data to geocode means it will be much more accurate data than the other free geocoders most of which just use TIGER data.

      Anyway, enough shameless self promotion. My point is just that we now have access to very high quality geocoding. Its no longer something you have to pay for, which is nice.

      Cheers,
      -Phillip
      [ Parent ]

  • Philllip comment on Spatiallly Adjusted

    (Score:1)
    by Satri (3) on Tuesday January 24, @09:12AM (#392)
    ( http://alexandreleroux.blogspot.com/ | Last Journal: Friday March 17, @04:07PM )
    You can also read more from Phillip in a Spatially Adjusted entry [spatiallyadjusted.com].

  • BatchGeocoder.com now creates KML files

    (Score:1)
    by Satri (3) on Monday January 30, @01:36PM (#407)
    ( http://alexandreleroux.blogspot.com/ | Last Journal: Friday March 17, @04:07PM )
    Directly from Spatially Adjusted [spatiallyadjusted.com], BatchGeocoder has been improved to allow the creation of KML files.