[postgis-users] TIGER geocoder with Census 2009 shapefiles

Kevin Galligan kg at kagii.com
Tue Mar 2 07:58:43 PST 2010 

I actually bought an early access copy of the book.  I work in linux and
have been playing around with different geocoders and the tiger files.  Most
recently with a ruby geocoder, for no other reason than I'm trying to find
one that is fairly complete and functional.

Any idea how "production quality" this particular one is?  If its fairly
high, I'll probably put some time in to get it working on linux.  I have the
full 2009 tiger dataset on an EC2 block drive, waiting to import into a
different database.

Right now I'm using zip+4 data to get a rough geocode, which is good enough
for what we're doing, but it only gets 92% of our non-PO Box data.  From my
experience with the tiger data, it only adds a couple percent at most above
that, but the geocoders I've used have been pretty hacky, so its possible
that was the issue.  Also, some of them seem to not be concerned with stuff
like matching "Main St" when you're looking for "Main Ln", which is pretty
terrible.

On the plus side, if there is major work going on with this geocoder (or any
tiger geocoder), I have a huge national data volume that will help stress
test the system.

Recently I've been toying with USC's free geocoder project.  In some areas
it actually gets about half of the data I previously could not, which is
impressive.

The really frustrating thing is, in general, the first 90% is cheap/free.
 The next 3-4% is marginally expensive.  The rest is really pricey.

Is there any idea how complete the tiger data is, and why there is this
apparent lack of data in there?  I find it strange.  Some streets are just
missing.  Stuff like that.

Rambling.  Anyway, will take a look later.  Thoughts on the quality of the
geocoder appreciated.

-Kevin

On Fri, Feb 26, 2010 at 11:52 PM, Paragon Corporation <lr at pcorp.us> wrote:

> David,
>
> As a matter of fact we've been working on that for chapter 10 of our
> upcoming book and think we have it all working.  As a part of the example
> generation process for our chapter 10, we had to come up with a way to load
> the tables that works on both windows and Linux.  Unfortunately we haven't
> had a chance to test the Linux loading approach, but is pretty much a
> parallel of the windows approach.
>
> To do so we started out with Steve's code, added some additional skeleton
> tables and a database function that generates a command line script for the
> respective OS.  Hopefully it all makes sense from the readme file we have
> packaged.
>
> We also changed one of the functions because there was an error in it and
> revised slightly to work with Tiger 2009 data.  You can dowload our
> slightly
> hacked version of Steve's code from our chapter 10 page.
>
> Steve -- if you are listening we are hoping to remerge your version with
> our
> loader part and bring back into the PostGIS distribution as part of PostGIS
> 1.5.1 or 2.0 release.
>
> http://www.postgis.us/chapter_10
>
>
> Leo and Regina
> http://www.postgis.us/
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: postgis-users-bounces at postgis.refractions.net
> [mailto:postgis-users-bounces at postgis.refractions.net] On Behalf Of Dave
> Fuhry
> Sent: Friday, February 26, 2010 3:04 PM
> To: PostGIS Users Discussion
> Subject: [postgis-users] TIGER geocoder with Census 2009 shapefiles
>
> I'm trying to set up the TIGER geocoder from
> http://www.snowman.net/git/tiger_geocoder/ which is new and aims to work
> with the new TIGER shapefiles.  I'm trying with the 2009 shapefiles from
> www2.census.gov/geo/tiger/TIGER2009/.
>
> I'm not sure how to create the roads_local table (derived closely from
> completechain in the old version).  A join between edges and addr?
>
> Wondering if anyone can offer any direction.  A relevant ticket is
> http://trac.osgeo.org/postgis/ticket/135.  The out-of-date file which used
> to create the roads_local table is tables/roads_local.sql, in the above
> repository.
>
> -Dave
>
>                                       Table "tiger.edges"
>   Column   |          Type          |                         Modifiers
> ------------+------------------------+----------------------------------
> ------------+------------------------+--------------------------
>  gid        | integer                | not null default
> nextval('public.edges_gid_seq'::regclass)
>  statefp    | character varying(2)   |
>  countyfp   | character varying(3)   |
>  tlid       | bigint                 |
>  tfidl      | bigint                 |
>  tfidr      | bigint                 |
>  mtfcc      | character varying(5)   |
>  fullname   | character varying(100) |
>  smid       | character varying(22)  |
>  lfromadd   | character varying(12)  |
>  ltoadd     | character varying(12)  |
>  rfromadd   | character varying(12)  |
>  rtoadd     | character varying(12)  |
>  zipl       | character varying(5)   |
>  zipr       | character varying(5)   |
>  featcat    | character varying(1)   |
>  hydroflg   | character varying(1)   |
>  railflg    | character varying(1)   |
>  roadflg    | character varying(1)   |
>  olfflg     | character varying(1)   |
>  passflg    | character varying(1)   |
>  divroad    | character varying(1)   |
>  exttyp     | character varying(1)   |
>  ttyp       | character varying(1)   |
>  deckedroad | character varying(1)   |
>  artpath    | character varying(1)   |
>  persist    | character varying(1)   |
>  gcseflg    | character varying(1)   |
>  offsetl    | character varying(1)   |
>  offsetr    | character varying(1)   |
>  tnidf      | bigint                 |
>  tnidt      | bigint                 |
>  the_geom   | public.geometry        |
>
>
>                                      Table "tiger.addr"
>  Column   |         Type          |                         Modifiers
> -----------+-----------------------+------------------------------------
> -----------+-----------------------+-----------------------
>  gid       | integer               | not null default
> nextval('public.addr_gid_seq'::regclass)
>  tlid      | bigint                |
>  fromhn    | character varying(12) |
>  tohn      | character varying(12) |
>  side      | character varying(1)  |
>  zip       | character varying(5)  |
>  plus4     | character varying(4)  |
>  fromtyp   | character varying(1)  |
>  totyp     | character varying(1)  |
>  fromarmid | integer               |
>  toarmid   | integer               |
>  arid      | character varying(22) |
>  mtfcc     | character varying(5)  |
>  statefp   | character varying(2)  | not null
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