GIS: Geocoding Services

Description Geocoding is the process of taking a street address and converting it into coordinates that can be plotted on a map. This conversion typically requires an API call to a remote server hosted by an organization/institution. The remote server will take the address attributes provided by you and the remote server will compare it to the data it contains and return a best estimate on the coordinates for that location.

There are many geocoding services available with different world coverages, quality of result, and set different rate limits for access. For R, a package called "tidygeocoder" provides an easy way to connect to these different services. As an additional benefit, their documentation provides a good summary of geocoding services available and links to their documentation. The link to the documentation for gecoding services accessible by "tidygeocoder" is provided below.

For Python, geopy package is a library that provides connection to various geocoding services. The link to the documentation for this package is also included below.