geocodingopen-source-gissoftware-recommendations
Is there any Geocoding tool which is open source and can be used in commercial application?
We tried Google geocoding API's but cannot continue with it because of some licensing limitation.
Now we are exploring GisGraphy but haven't finalized it.
Is any other better alternative available?
Currently we want to GeoCode US data only but in future we may extend it to other countries.
Here's a vote for Quantum GIS with GRASS plugin enabled as your desktop application. (QGIS is available on Windows, MacOS X and Linux). OGR/GDAL will take care of nearly any file format. Store all your data on PostgreSQL/ PostGIS and serve it out with Geoserver.
Yes, you can autocomplete against a geocode service.
Pseudo-code:
if >4 chars + keystroke + delay 300ms
Send Geocode request using text=inputBox.value
Here is how it looks at the front-end:
It waits for user to type in 4 characters, then populates a autocomplete flex component with the response.
When you choose an item from the dropdown, it zoom to the feature, and presents any additional results it found, using a green outline for high confident matches, and orange ones for lesser confident ones.
I have taken it a step further, and allowd the user to configure a bounding box, source country, state, and minimum candidate score within an XML file.
I need to tidy up some of the logic, and then I will try to put it into a flexviewer widget and upload to arcgis.com.
Best Answer
the best suitable option is not geonames OR openstreetmap but both, Geonames is good for city data, and Openstreetmap for streets, if you use both you will get a good dataset for geocoding. that's the goal of gisgraphy, use the two datasets to get the best relevance.