CODEWITHSUNDEEP
geolocationgeocodinggoogle-geocoding-api
Shaun Poore
Shaun Poore

Reputation: 642

Geolocation, Is it possible to get latitude and longitude from address and store locally in my database

I want to be able to run queries locally comparing latitude and longitude of locations so I can run queries for certain addresses I've captured based on distance.

I found a free database that has this information for zip codes but I want this information for more specific addresses. I've looked at google's geolocation service and it appears it's against the TOS to store these values in my database or to use them for anything other than doing stuff with google maps. (If somebody's looked deeper into this and I'm incorrect let me know)

Am I likely to find any (free or pay) service that will let me store these lat/lon values locally? The number of addresses I need is currently pretty small but if my site becomes popular it could expand quite a bit over time to a large number. I just need to get the coordinates of each address entered once though.

Upvotes: 4

Views: 5111

Answers (3)

Matt
Matt

Reputation: 23729

This question hasn't received enough attention...

You're correct -- it can't be done with Google's service and still conform to the TOS. Cheers to you for honestly seeking to comply with the TOS.

I work at a company called SmartyStreets where we process addresses and verify addresses -- and geocode them, too. Google's terms don't allow you to store the data returned from the API, and there's pretty strict usage limits before they throttle or cut off your access.

Screen scraping presents many challenges and problems which are both technical and ethical, and I don't suppose I'll get into them here. The Microsoft library linked to by Giorgio is for .NET only.

If you're still serious about doing this, we have a service called LiveAddress which is accessible from any platform or language. It's a RESTful API which can be called using GET or POST for example, and the output is JSON which is easy to parse in pretty much every common language/platform.

Our terms allow you to store the data you collect as long as you don't re-manufacture our product or build your own database in an attempt to duplicate ours (or something of the like). For what you've described, though, it shouldn't be a problem.

Let me know if you have further questions about address geocoding; I'll be happy to help.

By the way, there's some sample code at our GitHub repo: https://github.com/smartystreets/LiveAddressSamples

Upvotes: 1

Giorgio Aresu
Giorgio Aresu

Reputation: 1148

Also Microsoft provides this service. Check if this can help you http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc966913.aspx

Upvotes: 0

Nick Maroulis
Nick Maroulis

Reputation: 487

http://www.zip-info.com/cgi-local/zipsrch.exe?ll=ll&zip=13206&Go=Go could use a screen scraper if you just need to get them once.

Upvotes: 0

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