Geocoded Data

[jconley88]

This is a feature request for geocoding contributions and expenditures in order to enable a more accurate placement on a map. Since I believe that the data is stored in Mongo, the API could then support queries to find data near a certain location.

I don't have a clear idea of the amount of work involved in implementing this. A quick search of free and/or high limit services shows a couple of potentially viable options:

Public APIs:

http://open.mapquestapi.com/geocoding/ <- I couldnt' find any limits or usage restrictions http://cloudmade.com/products/geocoding <- limit: 100,000 per month http://www.opengeocoding.org/ http://www.openaddresses.org/ <- I couldn't access this

API's and/or downloadable code and data:

http://geocoder.us/ http://www.datasciencetoolkit.org/ https://github.com/geocommons/geocoder http://www.census.gov/geo/maps-data/data/tiger-geodatabases.html

[sampottinger]

Hello!

Thanks for the suggestion and this is certainly on our radar. Tonight I am planning on meeting with another developer on this project and will bring this up. Until then, I will keep this issue open.

Thanks and please let us know what else we can do, Sam

[jconley88]

Hey, I'm considering working on this for the Analyze Boulder meetup. Did you end up discussing what/how/if you wanted to do it? I could use a quick pointer to where the current code for parsing the TRACER resides if you do think that this would be good to work on.

[trinary]

Sorry, I really haven't had time to work on this yet. :( My idea was to write a daemon of some sort that would grab lists of records without geocoded data from the API, look them up, and populate the database. This would likely take a long time to get through the existing data, and the simplest way would be to either piggyback on @Samnsparky's pycotracer project (which is how we get and load the data) or just deal with the mongo database we're serving this from directly.

The more elaborate (and probably better) option would be to create a new user role in the API that can change data, write PUT/PATCH handlers and add an empty field for lat/lon for all existing data and filter queries, then write an API client that does the geocoding work.

Further thoughts?

[sampottinger]

Hey! I too apologize for the slow response on this and I was also thinking about having another service to perform the lookup. I also agree that the new user role is probably the "cleanest" way to do that. However, @trinary, you are right and, unfortunately, I don't think that will be ready before the meetup. :(

[jconley88]

Hey, thanks for getting back to me! I'm going to take a gander at it before tomorrow's meetup, but I'm fairly new to node, so that may be all I have time for.