Free-Form Strings to World City Geocodes

[Jennifer Bell]

As part of a project analyzing travel and hospitality expenses for the
Canadian federal government, we've collected 30K records and growing
of travel expenses for the last 4 years. The destinations (some times
multiple destinations) are free-form hand-entered strings. Obviously,
there's a great deal of variation in the ways people enter their
destination lists, but usually they just enter city names: eg.

Sault Ste. Marie, Etobicoke, Schawinigan
London then Paris
Toronto and Vancouver

(An origin of Ottawa is usually assumed.)

I'm right now looking at ways of turning these strings into geocodes.
I'm posting this here in the hopes of an "OMG I did something just
like that, and this is what you do." Off-the-top-of-the-head
suggestions are also welcome.

Jennifer Bell
visiblegovernment.ca

[Aaron Swartz]

http://www.geonames.org/ might be helpful.

[Neil Drumm]

My friend Chris Schmidt works at a company that provides that service.
Here is what he sent me to forward on:

MetaCarta does exactly this, using the 'GeoTagger'. They provide a
free-for-non-commercial-use API at http://ondemand.metacarta.com/ --
use the 'GeoTagger' functionality to see it.
http://developers.metacarta.com/api/geotagger/web-service/1.0.0/ has
some more documentation and URLs to check out, if you're interested,
or you can give crsc...@metacarta.com a ping, and he can help you
out.

-Neil

--
Neil Drumm
http://delocalizedham.com

[Jennifer Bell]

That's absolutely perfect, thanks.

Jennifer

On Jan 6, 2:52 pm, "Neil Drumm" <dr...@delocalizedham.com> wrote:
> My friend Chris Schmidt works at a company that provides that service.
> Here is what he sent me to forward on:
>
> MetaCarta does exactly this, using the 'GeoTagger'. They provide a
> free-for-non-commercial-use API athttp://ondemand.metacarta.com/--
> use the 'GeoTagger' functionality to see it.http://developers.metacarta.com/api/geotagger/web-service/1.0.0/has
> some more documentation and URLs to check out, if you're interested,

> or you can give crschm...@metacarta.com a ping, and he can help you