[okfn-za] South Africa Street Database

Sat Feb 11 15:25:01 UTC 2012

Depending on how many adresses you have, the Google maps api is going to 
do most of this for you, as a first stab at any rate. It's not open as 
in a fully available dataset, but it should do what you want. (I did not 
mention it initially, since it's not really open)

They have a limit of 2500 requests per day, but you can feed the API an 
address as a single string and get a fully qualified address back, with 
fields split up and geographic info. I used this for a shopfinder for a 
retail outlet last year.

I have some python code that gets the latitude and longitude for a given 
address from the API in about 10 lines of code. If you'd like, I'll send 
it to you (off-list). It's very basic, but you should be able to build 
on that.

I would actually offer to help more directly, but my time is very 
limited at the moment.

Basic documentation on the API:

http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/geocoding/

Hope this helps,

Johan

On 11/02/2012 17:01, Adi Eyal wrote:
> Thanks for the responses. I'll admit that I hadn't looked at open
> streetmaps because I didn't expect coverage to be good but ill
> definitely investigate.
>
> My use case is that I have a list of addresses that I would like to
> a) parse and correct (they were captured through a manual process so are
> likely to contain some errors
> b) validate, I want to check that those addresses do in fact exist
> c) geocode, I want to enrich the address database with x and y coordinates.
>
> There are commercial services that do this at a cost of R2 per record
> (well not a but certainly b and c). Alternatively, you can purchase the
> entire database for half a million.
>
> It seems to me that this type of database must be built on public data.
> The value-add is to collect data from the various municipalities and put
> it together in a single database.
>
> Even so, the price seems a little steep and I have no guarantee of good
> coverage especially since my database includes informal settlements.
>
> I was hoping that someone had already done some of this heavy lifting
> but if not, I might take a stab at it myself.
>
> Adi

-- 
Johan Beyers
Juizi Webhosting
johan at juizi.com
http://www.juizi.com
+27 82 928 6657