Create POI from physical address

http://www.poi-factory.com/node/6664

If this doesn't help, ask a more specific question.

Daniel

Hello Daddio101,

I used

http://www.batchgeocode.com/

You can copy and paste the info into the site, then it will give you the Longitude / Latitude for the physical address.

Hope this helps.

cachejunkies

Thanks! This is exactly what I needed.

I appreciate the help!

I would suggest doing a reality check first and use a mapping software to lookup the address and see how accurate it is. The way that Mapping software plots street addresses, they are often estimates, they do not have every individual address pinpointed, they pinpoint some and estimate the rest. Every mapping software gives my address as being 100 feet down the road.

I also do this for POIs, often the co-ordinates int he file do not match the street address, I have ended up as much as 10 miles from where the POI actually was and no where near the street it was supposed to route me to.

Totally agree.

That has got to be a short-coming in the Geocoding interface you have used. There are not that many actual Geocoding services (Google, Yahoo! and a few others) ... but there are zillions of web-sites that act as interfaces to them. Unfortunately, a lot of these web-sites don't pass on the 'Precision-level' that the Geocoder returned - especially in batch mode. Thus, you're left thinking that the result is just wrong - but the Geocoder probably said - "This is only accurate to the Zip-Code level (or worse)"

Of course, in order to actually navigate somewhere, you need a result that is accurate to at least the "Street" level - preferably the actual "Address" level.

Phil makes excellent points. I'll add that most of the mapping software is very "off" from the address systems for a lot of rural areas.

Depending on what you are trying to geocode, you may be able to get more accurate coordiantes using multiple methods. For example, when I'm looking for campgrounds, I can sometimes use Google Earth to get a visual of what want. Often a company's web site will have a map that can be compared to Google Earth, or they will describe thier location in enough detail to find it easier in G.E.

I did some testing. Since I am working on all the B of A's in the USA, this is a very large task. You can go to BofA and get the addresses, put them into GPS Visualizer Geocoder and have all the coordinates there for you. You then can cut and paste into your CSV file. The problem I found out was not all the coordinates were correct, some not even close. What I do now is bring up the BofA site where it shows the map. They use Microsoft Visual Earth. You can zoom in to see where the bank is. Then I bring up Garmin's Mapsource, put in the address and see if it is in the same place. If so, I grab the coordinates for the bank. This is time consuming but you end up with a specise lat/long for that bank. Sure does take a lot of time though.

Until recently within the past 10 years or so, GPS's have only been accurate upto 100 feet. It wasn't President Bill Clinton signed a bill to force the military into stopping sending signals to individual civilian gps units to disrupt the accuracy. When this bill came into effect it allowed gps's to be accurate to 10-15 feet. So im assuming that those sites are also using the same 100 foot principle.

I did somthing similar for a POI file I created. I found the location I was looking for using Google Maps and entered the code "javascript:void(prompt('',gApplication.getMap().getCenter()));" (without "") in the browser address bar and a popup shows you the co-ordinates in the center of the map (to 15 decimal points). I rounded to 6 decimal points. Cool thing is, once the code is in the address bar, it stays so I find my next location and hit "go" again for the new location.

that's pretty bad. mine that I could tell is usually only a few feet off. hmm, i have to look into this further.

The best way is to always double check your POI. Do a visual as much as possible. Sometimes if you give a address even in Google you will see that you may end up miles away if you don't double check. Plus if you donate your CSV file the person who will use it will be confidend that he may not be lost on spur of the moment decision to use your POI.