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

Tom Morris tfmorris at gmail.com
Tue Feb 19 23:29:48 UTC 2013


On Tue, Feb 19, 2013 at 3:55 PM, Tony.Hirst <Tony.Hirst at open.ac.uk> wrote:

> Peter
>
> As I'm guessing big software installs don't phase you, have you seen Pete
> Warden's Data Science toolkit; it's got a geocoding db I think, though I'm
> not sure what the coverage of it is? (I haven't tried it yet - on my to do
> list)
>
>
> http://petewarden.typepad.com/searchbrowser/2011/03/launching-the-data-science-toolkit.html
>
> If anyone on the list has played with it - what's it like?!;-)
>
> Also possibly of interest to others on the list, another Pete Warden
> service: OpenHeatmap - http://www.openheatmap.com/  (code
> https://github.com/petewarden/openheatmap )
>
> One of the things this has built in is recognition of some common region
> codes/identifiers - http://www.openheatmap.com/locationhelp.php


The commit comments imply that his Python geocoder is better than the PHP
one that OpenHeatmap is based on.

He has some interesting commentary about the quality of open geocoders in a
recent blog post:

http://petewarden.typepad.com/searchbrowser/2013/02/how-good-are-our-geocoders.html

In particular, he says that he doesn't consider Nominatum, the service
highlighted in the School of Data tutorial, to be good enough quality to
build OpenHeatmap on top of.

Tom
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