https://www.caktusgroup.com/tags/postgis/Recent content in Postgis on Caktus GroupHugoenWed, 28 Dec 2011 13:23:21 +0000https://www.caktusgroup.com/blog/2011/12/28/openblock-geocoder-part-3-external-geocoders/Wed, 28 Dec 2011 13:23:21 +0000https://www.caktusgroup.com/blog/2011/12/28/openblock-geocoder-part-3-external-geocoders/<p>The OpenBlock geocoder is powerful and robust. It uses PostGIS for spacial queries, can extract addresses from bodies of text, and can understand block and intersection notation. We've run into a few issues with it, however, including a low geocoding success rate. This is a tough problem to solve and depends on a lot of factors (the extent of street and block data in OpenBlock, format of the street addresses, etc.), so your mileage may vary. Below I constructed a simple test using Google's Geocoding API to have as an alternative.</p>https://www.caktusgroup.com/blog/2011/12/12/openblock-geocoder-part-1-data-model-and-geocoding/Mon, 12 Dec 2011 16:17:20 +0000https://www.caktusgroup.com/blog/2011/12/12/openblock-geocoder-part-1-data-model-and-geocoding/<p>As Tobias mentioned in <a href="http://www.caktusgroup.com/blog/2011/12/06/scraping-data-and-web-standards/">Scraping Data and Web Standards</a>, Caktus is collaborating with the UNC School of Journalism to help develop Open Rural (the code is on <a href="https://github.com/openrural">GitHub</a>). Open Rural hopes to help rural newspapers in North Carolina leverage <a href="http://openblockproject.org/">OpenBlock</a>. This blog post is the first of several covering the internals of OpenBlock and, specifically, the geocoder.</p>