Open Source Geocoding Engine

[Stephen Woodbridge]

Poopalasingham Elankeswaran wrote:
> Hi there,
>
> I am doing research on Address gecoding with Mapserver and
> PostgreSQL/PostGIS. Does anyone have any idea in this area? It is not like
> Goole Map or Mapquest. This has to be specifically for Southern Ontario,
> Canada. I need to search list of addresses and displaying them together on a
> Map or save all the corresponding points to a shape file.
>
> Is there any Open Source Geocoding Engine?

Not that I am aware of if you mean a generic one that you might apply to
your requirements. There are Tiger geocoders around, but they are
specific to Tiger data and therefore the US.

You will need street data the covers your area of interest that has
street address ranges. You can then load that into a DB and do SQL
queries on street name where the house number is between the ranges on
the street segments, then interpolate along the street shape vectors to
get the lat/lon of the address. It will help to improve you searching if
you standardize road names and abbreviation before you load the data
into the database and when you get data to geocode so they are more
likely to match.

-Steve W.