Why Geocoding Should be a Commodity
July 13th, 2009by Sean Gorman
About the Author: Sean Gorman founded FortiusOne in 2005 to bring location based analytics to the mass market. Sean brings over 10 years of experience at the forefront of the geospatial revolution as a researcher, practitioner, and entrepreneur at FortiusOne. Through both academic and entreprenurial efforts he has been working to make geographic data more accessible to the public since 1997 culminating in the creation of GeoCommons – a crowd-sourced repository of statistical data and social feeds that can be easily mapped, remixed and reused by non-technical users.
Sean has been featured in media such as, Wired, Der Spiegel, ABC, Washington Post, Business 2.0, MSNBC, CBS and CNN. He also holds a PhD. From George Mason University in Public Policy where he was the Provost’s High Potential Scholar and was the recipient of the Fischer Prize. He has published dozens of articles on geographic data sharing and analysis, and authored the book Networks, Complexity and Security: The Role of Public Policy in Critical Infrastructure Protection. Read more from this authorArguably the largest positive externality to the Web ecosystem that geospatial technologies can provide is creating more linked geo-enabled data. The beauty is the externalities work both ways. Not only does the Web get more useful content we also create more reasons for the public to use geospatial tools and software. Without the ability to geoereference data none of our collective mapping brilliance is terribly useful. Yet we put all sorts of obstacles in the way of the most basic geo-enabling capabilities – namely geocoding. We treat geocoding as a precious resource that needs to be metered and monetized. In short we put a strangle hold on the lifeblood of our business, geo-enabled data. Without geo-enabled content our relevance to the larger Web diminishes immensely.
The major providers all put restrictions around geocoding making it especially difficult to do batch geocoding operations to get large chunks of data geo-enabled. Google, Yahoo and Microsoft’s geocoders are all geared to single address look ups, and not for mass data geo-enablement. There are services like batchgeocode.com that get around some of the limitations but are still restricted by provider’s TOS.
The second big issue with current geocoding is further upstream. All the geocoding API’s are dependent on NAVTEQ, TeleAtlas’s and a few other providers data to geocode against. So, if the street data companies don’t think a country has a big enough market you can’t geocode in these areas. This especailly limits the ability to geocode data in developing countries.
Our thought is the best solution to this problem is an open source geocoder. There have been other open source geocoder projects, some of which have taken criticism as a bad business decisions.
We’ve taken a slightly different approach. One, we enlisted the brilliant help of Schuyler to evolve his work from Geocoder.us to best take advantage of the work and community already existing. Second, we decided to make the Geocoder street data neutral. Meaning that you can plug whatever street data source you want into the geocoder and have it work – sometimes with a bit of tweaking. In the first go we’ve set up the geocoder to work with TIGER data and NAVTEQ. We chose these two mainly because they both use all CAPS for their names.
The hope is that with the community’s help we can extend the geocoder to work with a large number of other data sources. As Andrew mentioned in his post OpenStreetMap is top of the list. Integrating OSM data will be key enabling geocoding in developing countries and other areas overlooked by current commercial providers. I think this is one of many areas where the OSM community is really going to show its power. While the geocoder is currently only accessible to developers through github, stay tuned because we’ll be exposing it as a web application in GeoCommons shortly. We want everyone to be able to geo-enable their data and access it in whatever format meets their needs. Data wants to be free and we all win when the gates are unlocked.
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July 13th, 2009 at 10:49 am
Great post – no doubt this is needed.
There was considerable discussions in the past 6 months within the PAGC geocoder project – http://www.pagcgeo.org/ of techncial re-architecting as a basis for a broad based open source geocoder that appears to align with the vision you’ve described.
If you haven’t already — I’d suggest trying to pool resources since there is a common goal between these efforts and communities.
Dave
July 13th, 2009 at 4:00 pm
Thanks Dave – we’ll check it out. Any means by which we can get more folks working on a collective project is great. Appreciate the feedback.
best,
sean
July 16th, 2009 at 2:07 am
[...] working with geo mashups should take note: geospatial startup FortiusOne has said that “geocoding should be a commodity” and has announced that it has released a new open source geocoder. If you’re not familiar [...]
July 21st, 2009 at 7:56 am
[...] working with geo mashups should take note: geospatial startup FortiusOne has said that “geocoding should be a commodity” and has announced that it has released a new open source geocoder. If you’re not familiar [...]
July 21st, 2009 at 9:46 am
[...] working with geo mashups should take note: geospatial startup FortiusOne has said that “geocoding should be a commodity” and has announced that it has released a new open source geocoder. If you’re not familiar with [...]
July 27th, 2009 at 1:06 pm
[...] We utilize a variety of tools, many open-source. And where there are key pieces missing, we have developed solutions and even open-sourced them to the greater benefit of the [...]
July 27th, 2009 at 3:18 pm
[...] We utilize a variety of tools, many open-source. And where there are key pieces missing, we have developed solutions and even open-sourced them to the greater benefit of the [...]
September 6th, 2009 at 1:30 am
I agree, I spent days (which is a long time on Google!) looking for a batch geocoder a few years ago. Mr Holmstrand has done a great job with batchgeocode.com, and I used it extensively (still do).
I recently launched a batch IP geocoder that takes an existing list of IP addresses and plots them on a map (and outputs a list of places and lat/lng coordinates). Why did I create a service like that? Because I couldn’t find another one that would geocode more than one IP address, without charging me for it. I hope to fill a hole, just as Mr Holmstrand did for me…
batchiplocator.webatu.com
October 28th, 2009 at 5:36 am
This has taken me so long to access and my developers have been flat out for months if finding a provider in the UK who offer Geocoding, reverse geocoding distance calculation, map management, route calculation with excellent maps and mapping technology)and accuracy. Coverage was key in choosing ViaMichelin too as they are a respected brand.
Google lacked support and the Geocoding was very expensive and not great. The other local providers could not stand up and deliver what is needed for me working in the transport industry as good logistics can save you money.
ViaMichelin were so cost effective I saved thousands of what I would ahev paid elsewhere and have a flawless solutions which has allowed me to win many more clients. I would highly recommend VIAMICHELIN as a provider and the contact there is MARK who came to meet me to discuss my needs, there was no pressure and when I had all the info from 4 companies, It was a no brainer in choosing ViaMichelin Business Mapping and Geolocation for my GIS Geocoding web based webservices platform, It did not take long to developer inhouse and they host it too
October 29th, 2009 at 7:32 am
Thanks Nick, will take this on board, so many companies looking for store locators, store finder, finder, branch and dealer locator solution in the UK use Google, but they miss a trick. Being so hard to use a better solution like ViaMichelin not only could save people time but increase the chance of a user visit.
You cant argue against Viamichelin’s fantastic driving directions. Viamichelin really have excellent journey planner to works our routes