Support geocoding of cross streets

[arencambre]

The current geocode function does not handle cross streets (e.g., hollywood & vine, los angeles, ca). This feature request is to implement something like geocode_intersection(roadway1, roadway2, city, state, zip) that would allow this geocoding.

The final result should probably be directly in the middle of the intersection instead of offset as with geocode.

[woodbri]

I do not recommend using an '&' character as the intersection indicator from the point of view that the Tiger data does have street names the contain an '&' character like "B & O", "Tom & Ann" or something like that, and others. I already did this analysis when looking at PAGC geocoder and Tiger data. You will also find the word "and" in some street names so that is not good as a separator either. In PAGC I arbitrarily pick the '@' character as it is not used in the Tiger data and it reads as "street a (at) street b" which seems as good as any definition for an intersection.

[robe]

Done at r8275 (also documented). I'm keeping this open though because the performance is not as good as the project I cut it from. Granted that was doing a bit of cheating and osme oter things like (500 feet from the intersection of etc) which most of which is not appropriate for a generic solution, but I think the performance can be significantly improved. For the samples I'm doing on my windows box, I'm getting like 3-4 second timings which is worse than the under 1 second I'm getting in my other app.

[robe]

Make that r8275 and r8276. I had forgotten to actually include the new function and update the upgrade and install scripts in last commit.

[arencambre]

I implemented the latest tiger_2010 extra package and get no results when I use geocode_intersection. I am getting valid results when I use geocode on a nearby address.

I've tried this on a few addresses and am getting consistent results each time.

Don't know if it matters, but it takes a few seconds to run geocode, whereas geocode_intersection returns results in about 30 ms.

I used ​http://www.letseehere.com/postgis-geocoder-using-tiger-2010-data to set up my geocoding DB. I initially set it up a few weeks ago, before geocode_intersection was in tiger_2010. Today, I ran upgrade_geocode.sql against the latest revision 8354 of ​http://svn.osgeo.org/postgis/trunk/extras/tiger_geocoder/tiger_2010/.

[robe]

Aren,

Which cross streets were you trying to geocode and can you provide the statement you were using. I don't have all the states loaded in my Db, but the ones I have tried have worked.

Also did you check the manual? ​http://www.postgis.org/documentation/manual-svn/Geocode_Intersection.html

Also Which PostgreSQL version are you running on?

[arencambre]

The problem is capitalization of the state field. Filed new bug report at #1366. I think it was you who posted this on the postgis email list?

[robe]

correct. Thanks

[robe]

This is done, but I'll put the improve performance as separate ticket which is not guaranteed to happen in 2.0