Physical Address to GeoLocation UK - geolocation

Is there a good physical address to GeoLocation conversion database in the UK? I am trying to use this to build a globrix style search box http://www.globrix.com/ for a web application. Any pointers will be nice. I have been searching for hours. I have found several that convert UK Postcodes into Geolocation. But I need the addresses listed as on Globrix.

The Google Maps API provides a geocoder webservice that you can actually use independently of Google Maps itself. You send it the address/postcode, and it responds with a lat/long plus disambiguated addresses. We use it server-side in the UK to do address lookup. It's incredibly quick, too.
http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/geocoding/index.html

http://www.postcodeanywhere.co.uk should be able to help with this. Alternatively, you can buy the "PAF" (Postcode Address File) from the Royal Mail, but it is expensive.

Update for information relating UK geolocations in 2020. Since 2009:
Google's Geocoder has gotten an order of magnitude more expensive in 2018. It's ~0.5c per search with no free tier
Office for National Statistics have released a free postcode directory called ONSPD. This means if you have the postcode of your address, you can resolve a geolocation accurate to the postcode centroid (this may be 10-100m or so out). There's a free public service API available at https://postcodes.io which allows you to forward or reverse geocode a postcode. There are also public docker data and application images which allow you to host this easily
If you're interested in Rooftop accurate geocodes, a change in Ordnance Survey licensing in 2020 has meant its much simpler and cheaper to access geolocations for almost every premise in Great Britain from Ordnance Survey by combining it with Royal Mail PAF (Postcode Address File). As of September 2020, I think https://ideal-postcodes.co.uk is currently the only company to offer complete and authoritative rooftop geolocations under these new rules. It's likely other PAF vendors will catch up over the coming years.
Disclaimer: I'm the author of postcodes.io and work for ideal-postcodes.co.uk

Related

Are there any free GeoIP services which are accurate to detect whether 2 addresses are within 6Km?

I have to make a restaurant home delivery website, and the owners do not wish to deliver more than 6km away. I hear that the geoIP DB 'Maxmind GeoLite city' is not particularly accurate though. Furthermore if you know of a database that has a shortcode, or predefined query for obtaining the distance without loads of coding, I would love to hear about it! I hope the question is well defined enough. All advice welcome!
I don't know the specification of your project, but it's likely you do know the delivery address. In this case you could use Google's Geocoding APIs to get the position (lat,lng) and then calculate the distance.
Of course there are limitations in the amount of daily requests, but I hardly think your app will reach that limit.
Take a look here:
https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/geocoding
As far as I know, there are no free IP geolocation databases that will reliably provide the accuracy you are looking for, especially if your client has visitors using mobile devices.
I would recommend that you take a look at W3C Geolocation JavaScript API. The results from this will often be more accurate than IP geolocation, especially if the user is on a device with GPS. Do note that it will pop up a dialog asking the user whether they want to share their location with your site.
HTML5 geo location if far more accurate than IP address based location.
http://ipgeo5.com/

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

Reverse geocoding services

I'm working on a project that returns information based on the user's location. I also want to display the user's town in text (no map) so they can change it if it's not accurate.
If things go well I hope this will be more than a small experiment, so can anyone recommend a good reverse geocoding service with the least restrictions? I notice that Google/Yahoo have a limit to the number of daily queries along with other usage terms. I basically need to take latitude and longitude and convert them to a city/town (which I presume cannot be done using the HTML5 Geolocation API).
Geocoda just launched a geocoding and spatial database service and offers up to 1K queries a month free, with paid plans starting at $49 for 25,000 queries/month. SimpleGeo just closed their Context API so you may want to look at Geocoda or other alternatives.
You're correct, the browser geolocation API only provides coordinates.
I use SimpleGeo a lot and recommend them. They offer 10K queries a day free then 0.25USD per 1K calls after that. Their Context API is what you're going to want, it pretty much does what is says on the tin. Works server-side and client-side (without requiring you to draw a map, like Google.)
GeoNames can also do this and allows up to 30K "credits" a day, different queries expend different credit amounts. The free service has highly variable performance, the paid service is more consistent. I've used them in the past, but don't much anymore because of the difficulty of automatically dealing with their data, which is more "pure" but less meaningful to most people.

Where are AWS data center locations listed?

I'm failing at Google search today. Is there a page that lists geolocations of the various Amazon AWS server farms?
I want to use this data to pick the appropriate farm for a client on a web app, CDN-style.
(This isn't programming, but it's for the purpose of programming, and I thought it would be useful to have this question answered for public consumption.)
Very late to the party, but in case anyone else has the same question, we've done some work to map AWS regional data centers by the fastest connection to each country (and state in US):
http://www.turnkeylinux.org/blog/aws-datacenters
The code used to this has been open sourced:
https://github.com/turnkeylinux/aws-datacenters
Mashup of associations and worldwide underwater cables:
Regarding the GeoIP implementation, see:
http://www.turnkeylinux.org/blog/geoip-amazon-regions
Each service's detail page (e.g. http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/, http://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/) provides this information.
WikiLeaks - AmazonAtlas
Confidential AWS datacenters location has been leaked:
11 October 2018, WikiLeaks publishes a "Highly Confidential" internal document from the cloud computing provider Amazon. The document from late 2015 lists the addresses and some operational details of over one hundred data centers spread across fifteen cities in nine countries
https://wikileaks.org/amazon-atlas/
https://wikileaks.org/amazon-atlas/map/
datacenters.com
The best reference I found for tracking down the individual data center locations is datacenters.com's locations page: https://www.datacenters.com/locations
From there you can see locations and details of individual data centers like AWS Ashburn
domenech's Google Maps overlay
The other reference I cam across is from this blog post from domenech: Amazon Web Services Google Maps: World Domination Map
Direct link to the map here
An updated list here:
https://gist.github.com/atyachin/a011edf76df66c5aa1eac0cdca412ea9
Compiled from various sources including those mentioned in other answers.
Coordinates represent the location of a specific datacenter in the zone. Most availability-zones have multiple datacenters so there's no single coordinate for each AZ.

Finding City and Zip Code for a Location

Given a latitude and longitude, what is the easiest way to find the name of the city and the US zip code of that location.
(This is similar to https://stackoverflow.com/questions/23572/latitude-longitude-database, except I want to convert in the opposite direction.)
Related question: Get street address at lat/long pair
Any of the online services mentioned and their competitors offer "reverse geocoding" which does what you ask--convert lon/lat coordinates into a street address of some-sort.
If you only need the zip codes and/or cities, then I would obtain the Zip Code database and urban area database from the US Census Bureau which is FREE (paid for by your tax dollars). http://www.census.gov/geo/www/cob/zt_metadata.html.
From there, you can either come up with your own search algorithm for the spatial data or make use of one of a spatial databases such as Microsoft SQL Server, PostGIS, Oracle Spatial, ArcSDE, etc.
Update: The 2010 Census data can be found at:
http://www2.census.gov/census_2010/
This is the web service to call.
http://developer.yahoo.com/search/local/V2/localSearch.html
This site has ok web services, but not exactly what you're asking for here.
http://www.usps.com/webtools/
You have two main options:
Use a Reverse Geocoding Service
Google's can only be used in conjunction with an embedded Google Map on the same page, so I don't recommend it unless that is what you are doing.
Yahoo has a good one, see http://developer.yahoo.com/search/local/V3/localSearch.html
I've not used OpenStreetMap's. Their maps look very detailed and thorough, and are always getting better, but I'd be worried about latency and reliability, and whether their address data is complete (address data is not directly visible on a map, and OpenStreetMap is primarily an interactive map).
Use a Map of the ZIP Codes
The US Census publishes a map of US ZIP codes here. They build this from their smallest statistical unit, a Census Block, which corresponds to a city block in most cases. For each block, they find what ZIP code is most common on that block (most blocks have only one ZIP code, but blocks near the border between ZIP codes might have more than one). They then aggregate all the blocks with a given ZIP code into a single area called a Zip Code Tabulation Area. They publish a map of those areas in ESRI shapefile format.
I know about this because I wrote a Java Library and web service that (among other things) uses this map to return the ZIP code for a given latitude and longitude. It is a commercial product, so it won't be for everyone, but it is fast, easy to use, and solves this specific problem without an API. You can read about this product here:
http://askgeo.com/database/UsZcta2010
And about all of your geographic offerings here:
http://askgeo.com
Unlike reverse geocoding solutions, which are only available as Web APIs because running your own service would be extremely difficult, you can run this library on your own server and not depend on an external resource.
If you call volume to the service gets up too high, you should definitely consider getting your own set of postal data. In most cases, that will provide all of the information that you need, and there are plenty of db tools for indexing location data (i.e. PostGIS for PostgreSQL).
You can buy a fairly inexpensive subscription to zipcodes with lat and long info here: http://www.zipcodedownload.com/
Or google's reverse geocoding
link
http://maps.google.com/maps/geo?output=xml&q={0},{1}&key={2}&sensor=true&oe=utf8
where 0 is latitude 1 is longitude
geonames has an extensive set of ws that can handle this (among others):
http://www.geonames.org/export/web-services.html#findNearbyPostalCodes
http://www.geonames.org/export/web-services.html#findNearbyPlaceName
Another reverse geocoding provider that hasn't been listed here yet is OpenStreetMap: you can use their Nominatim search service.
OSM has the (potentially?) added bonus of being entirely user editable (wiki-like) and thus having a very liberal licencing scheme of all this data. Think of this of open source map data.

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