A geocoder that relies on offline TIGER/Line data useful for geocoding private health information.
See geocoding documentation for a description of how this service works and advice for getting and using the best results.
This software was designed and tested on Linux Ubuntu. The following install instructions are for Ubuntu. CentOS install instructions are also below, but are not throughly tested.
Install required software:
sudo apt-get install sqlite3 libsqlite3-dev flex ruby-full libssl-dev libssh2-1-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev curl libxml2-dev
Install ruby gems:
sudo gem install sqlite3
sudo gem install json
sudo gem install Text
sudo gem install sinatra
Download the git repo to the home directory and then compile the SQLite3 extension and the Geocoder-US Ruby gem:
cd ~
git clone git@github.com:simonsfoundation/geocoder.git
cd geocoder
sudo make install
sudo gem install Geocoder-US-2.0.4.gem
The program relies on a sqlite3 database created from TIGER/Line files that is about 4.6 GB. Download the compiled database based on 2015 TIGER/Line files into the /opt directory so it is accessible by all users.
sudo wget https://colebrokamp-dropbox.s3.amazonaws.com/geocoder.db -P /opt
Alternatively, build your own database (see the section below for details).
The program takes in one character string and parses address components in order to search the database. To geocode an address, call ruby to run the program with the address string as the argument:
ruby ~/geocoder/bin/geocode.rb "3333 Burnet Ave Cincinnati Ohio 45229"
This results in a file called temp.json being written to the current directory with the results. It is possible to pipe this output into another file, but the user will likely be geocoding more than one file at a time, using batch geocoding.
The geocode.R program uses the argparser package to take in command line arguments which define both the name of the CSV file and name of the column in that file which contain the address strings.
ruby lib/geocoder/us/rest.rb /opt/geocoder.db
http://localhost:8081/geocode.json?q=3333%20Burnet%20Ave%20Cincinnati%20Ohio%2045229