Obtain latitude and longitude from address without

Question

I am currently working on a large population-based database where it is required that I compute the distance between two addresses for each individual. My first train of thought was to obtain the latitude and longitude representing each address and then compute the distance. I used Google API's to obtain the latitude and longitude for these addresses via various packages in R (e.g. dismo). However Google has a restriction of 2500 requests in a 24hr period. I have about 300,000 addresses and by running 2,500/day, I will not be able to meet the deadline.

Would anyone have suggestions regarding other API's I could use to obtain the latitude and longitude using R?

Thank you.

Answer 1

I would recommend that you try the RDSTK package which interfaces with the Data Science Toolkit. It is available on github.

EDIT. To compute the Road Distance, I would recommend the Mapquest Directions API, which appears to have no preset limits as per this link. Let me know how it goes.

Answer 2

More options:

• The geonames package to retrieve information from the geonames service.
• The osmar package to use the API of openstreetmap.

Besides, the gdistance package is useful for distance calculations on geographical grids.

Answer 3

What you are doing is called "geocoding". Knowing that will greatly improve your ability to search for more info :) You may have already known that since you tagged the question properly, but I wanted to make sure.

Here's a really good previous Stack Overflow question, albeit not R specific.