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geocoding street addresses within R, not using any web-based services

4 messages · Christopher W. Ryan, Thierry Onkelinx, Alex Mandel +1 more

Original
Christopher W. Ryan
# 
Hello. I'm a longtime R and R-help user, and recent listener on
R-sig-geo. First post here. I use R on both Win 7 and Linux Mint.

Is there a way to geocode street addresses in the US within R on my
local machine, that is, without transmitting the addresses to any
web-based service?  I have about 26,000 street addresses for a certain
type of ambulance call. I'd prefer (so does my Institutional Review
Board) that the addresses remain with me.

So far I have been using ArcGIS to geocode them on my own machine, and
then export the resulting shapefiles of point patterns to R, for
analysis with spatstat. But I'd rather to it all within R if possible.
(I get frustrated with menu-driven ArcGIS.)

My data are street addresses, not lon/lat coordinates. I have street
segment databases for the relevant counties from the US Census Bureau
TIGER shapefiles.

Thanks for any help.

--Chris Ryan
Broome County Health Department and
Binghamton University and
SUNY Upstate Medical University
Binghamton, NY
Thierry Onkelinx
# 
Dear Christopher,

Have a look at the rgeos and spgrass6 packages. rgeos provides several GIS
operations. spgrass6 allows to move data from R to GRASS GIS (and vice
versa). You can run GRASS operations from within R.

Best regards,

Thierry

ir. Thierry Onkelinx
Instituut voor natuur- en bosonderzoek / Research Institute for Nature and
Forest
team Biometrie & Kwaliteitszorg / team Biometrics & Quality Assurance
Kliniekstraat 25
1070 Anderlecht
Belgium

To call in the statistician after the experiment is done may be no more
than asking him to perform a post-mortem examination: he may be able to say
what the experiment died of. ~ Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher
The plural of anecdote is not data. ~ Roger Brinner
The combination of some data and an aching desire for an answer does not
ensure that a reasonable answer can be extracted from a given body of data.
~ John Tukey

2016-01-21 16:18 GMT+01:00 Christopher W. Ryan <cryan at binghamton.edu>:

  
  


  


      

    

    

      
      

        


  

        

      Alex Mandel
    

    

      
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A local postgis setup could work too, http://postgis.net/docs/Extras.html

Can probably use it from R with RPostgresql

Enjoy,
Alex

        
On 01/22/2016 01:50 AM, Thierry Onkelinx wrote:

            

      
      
      
    

        

      
      
    

            

      
      
      
    

        

      
      
    

  
  


  


      

    

    

      
      

        


  

        

      Ray Melton
    

    

      
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I can verify that geocoding street addresses in the US with the PostGIS 
TIGER geocoder works, and that you can use RPostgreSQL from R to issue 
the geocoding commands.

I'm running Linux Mint 17.1, and to get the geocoder working, I simply 
went through the steps as outlined in PostGIS in Action, 2nd edition, 
Chapter 8.

Ray

        
On 01/22/2016 08:38 AM, Alex Mandel wrote: