[postgis-users] Re: Status of geocoding functions in PostGIS?

[Putler, Dan]

Sorry about the wrong email contact on the last post. The PAGC  
contact email is pagcmail at gmail.com.

Dan

On 31-Mar-06, at 8:24 AM, Putler, Dan wrote:

> Hi Steve,
>
> At the moment we are working on two things. First, modifying PAGC so
> that we can use it to augment road network files, particularly the
> new StatsCan road network. The data is released province by province,
> but their are no local identifiers. So common addresses like 821 10th
> street get multiple perfect matches. The second thing we are doing is
> allowing people to edit the address ranges (temporarily) on the fly.
> Often the address range information is incomplete or simply missing
> for some streets in all the road network files we have worked with.
> So a user will often find an address range that is very close, but
> not exact. PAGC will allow them to alter the address range of the
> "close" road segment, and geocode relative to the altered segment's
> address range. The users changes will be written to a separate file,
> with the idea that we might be able to collaboratively filter users
> proposed changes to update the underlying road layer.
>
> Right now PAGC is a command line tool (and is about as complicated to
> use as something like ogr2ogr), and a bit more oriented to doing
> batch geocoding. Converting it to a library is likely to be next
> after we get the address range editing capability to a reasonable
> level, as well as figuring out what we need to do to allow PAGC to be
> used in web applications. Up to this point we have not thought about
> creating a library oriented towards implementing a Postgres stored
> procedure. It does make a lot of sense. I will say we are likely to
> need a hand or two (or three) to help us do that. Walter Sinclair is
> the lead developer on PAGC itself, while I handle testing and data
> issues. Neither of us has much (read "no") experience with Postgres
> internals. Walter's underlying geocoding engine is really excellent
> (much better that the commercial  products I have used), but certain
> very worthwhile extensions we are going to need help implementing. If
> you, or anyone else on this list, is interested in helping out the
> PAGC project, please get a hold of us at pagcmail at google.com.
>
> Dan
>
> On 31-Mar-06, at 4:54 AM, Stephen Woodbridge wrote:
>
> > Hi Dan,
> >
> > Have you guys made any progress in refactoring PAGC to be a
> > library. Since I see you on this list also have you thought about
> > building a library that can be used to implement a Postgres stored
> > procedure using PAGC?
> >
> > PAGC is very cool with lots of nice technology but it is a little
> > difficult to get ones arms around it in its current state :), OK
> > for me anyway.
> >
> > Very nice work,
> >   -Steve
> >
> > Putler, Dan wrote:
> >> Hi Paul,
> >> You might want to look at the PAGC project (www.pagcgeo.org),
> >> which I'm a member of. PAGC is written in C and works with
> >> shapefiles. The intention goal is also to make PAGC extensible so
> >> it can be used for geocoding postal addresses in a number of
> >> countries. Currently it works out of the box with TIGER/Line data
> >> and the new Statistics Canada public road network file (that
> >> actually needs to be augmented with additional information until
> >> it is really useful). The problem we have run into is that few
> >> governments release address ranged road network files (we only
> >> know that the US and Canada do, and all the EU countries don't),
> >> so we haven't been able to work with anything other than US and
> >> Canadian data. It sounds like you might benefit from our code
> >> base, and there could be room for collaboration at some point.
> >> Dan
> >> On 30-Mar-06, at 9:48 PM, Paul Scott wrote:
> >>  > On Fri, 2006-03-31 at 04:48 +0000, Mark Thomas wrote:
> >>  >>>
> >>  >>> Alex Smith wrote:
> >>  >>>> Did some searching of the archives and found this article
> >> >>>> stating that a
> >>  >>>> geocoder for PostGIS is in the works (see
> >>  >>>>
> >>  >> http://postgis.refractions.net/pipermail/postgis-users/2004-
> >>  >> September/005762.html).
> >>  >>
> >>  >
> >>  > If you would like to contribute to a project that is based on
> >> > creating a
> >>  > set of global geocoders, take a look at
> >>  > http://avoir.uwc.ac.za/projects/geocoder/
> >>  >
> >>  > This project is attempting to collect geocoders that will  
> work for
> >>  > almost anywhere that you may need. If you would like to join the
> >>  > project, please just let me know!
> >>  >
> >>  > --Paul
> >>  >
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