Geocoding
Getting lat,lng from address or name of the place. Essential in Geovisualization. One way is using APIs of Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc, and the other way is using geocoding databases that contains information to translate location names.
Methods & APIs
- http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/geocoding/ - 2,500 per day + you should display map to use API.
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https://developer.yahoo.com/boss/geo/docs/free_YQL.html#table_pf - 2,000 per day for non-commercial
- http://www.metacarta.com/
- http://www.infochimps.com/apis/geo
Softwares and Libraries
It seems like there is no library that uses new Yahoo place finder API. All of them uses deprecated Yahoo maps API.
- http://code.google.com/p/geopy/ - a geocoding toolbox for Python
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http://github.com/petewarden/geodict - “A simple Python library/tool for pulling location information from unstructured text”
- http://github.com/collectiveidea/graticule - a Ruby geocoder
- http://github.com/simonw/geocoders - “Ultra simple API for geocoding a single string against various web services” (Python)
- https://github.com/thampiman/reverse-geocoder
- https://github.com/tylfin/GeosPy
Tips
You can specify language and country of interest when using Yahoo or Google api (google maps example).
Domain specific tools
US
- petesearch:free bulk geocoding for us addresses - Using downloadable database to geocode massive data.