[CUWiN-Dev] geocoding

[Zachary C. Miller]

I've been looking for a free geocoder for a long time and have finally
found one. I have installed the perl module Geo::Coder::US and
processed the 4GB of US Census Tiger/Line data into
/extra2/geocoder.db. 

There is an example script that uses this at /home/wolfgang/geocode.pl

Call it like this (on my server, imsahp):

% /home/wolfgang/bin/geocode.pl 107 West Washington, Urbana, IL

And it gives output like this:

107 W Washington
Urbana, IL 61801
40.105642 -88.207462

It doesn't do any network access to do this, all the geocoding data is
stored locally on my server.

So if CUWiN folks want to get the latlongs for installed nodes it is
now extremely easy to do that (without taking a GPS to the site) in an
automated way if you have an address. You won't be able to store the
geocoding database on a node because it is 800MB but you can write CGI
scripts or offline batch processing scripts to run on
cuwireless.net. Whatever crazy creative stuff you can think of.

-- 
Zachary C. Miller - @= - http://zach.chambana.net/
IMSA 1995 - UIUC 2000 - Just Another Leftist Muppet - Ya Basta!
 Social Justice, Community, Nonviolence, Decentralization, Feminism,
 Sustainability, Responsibility, Diversity, Democracy, Ecology