[ddj] [School-of-data] Geocoding tutorials on the School of Data Blog

Tue Feb 19 22:55:05 UTC 2013

On Tue, Feb 19, 2013 at 8:55 AM, Lucy Chambers <lucy.chambers at okfn.org>wrote:

> Hi All,
>
> If anyone has ever wanted to know how to convert simple place names in a
> spreadsheet to lat and long values so that they can put their data on a
> map, Rufus Pollock has just put up a couple of tutorials on the School of
> Data blog.
>
> An introduction to Geocoding:
> http://schoolofdata.org/2013/02/19/geocoding-part-i-introduction-to-geocoding/
>
> Geocoding in a Google Docs Spreadsheet:
> http://schoolofdata.org/2013/02/19/geocoding-part-ii-geocoding-data-in-a-google-docs-spreadsheet/
>
>
> We'll be looking to port them over to the School of Data Handbook in the
> near future, so please let us know what you think of them (feel free to use
> the blog comments or the mailing lists!).
>

I may be biased, but I'd much rather use JSON that XML. If you used
OpenRefine/Google Refine instead of Google Spreadsheets, you wouldn't have
the 50 place limit and you wouldn't have to deal with XPath expressions.

For the Google Spreadsheets version, I'd suggest not hardcoding the place
name in the URL, but instead picking it up from the first column.  (The
tutorial text has it right but it's wrong in the live example spreadsheet).

Tom
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