Geographic Coordinates from Postal Zip Codes?
David Allen
I've been a lay lurker in this group for some time -- amazing how long
that plumbing the rod thread has lasted -- and wanted to know if
someone could give me a quick pointer to a data source, preferable a
CSV table of zip codes (again, preferabley zip+4), that have geograpic
coordinates for their centers.
I know this group is not specifically oriented toward this, but
possibly some one can provide an immediate, precise, fully
comprehensive (and comprehendable!) solution. Just kidding.
AutoDesk's Mapguide Utility somehow can specify a decimal Lon/Lat
coordinate for any street address in the US, to 8 decimal places of a
degree. I don't necessarily need that detail, but would like to have
a quick way of computing distances between field locations and
homes/offices of members of our professional baseball umpires
association. Stop shaking your head.
Any help would be much appreciated.
Regards,
Dave Allen
Falls Church, VA
all...@mnsinc.com
Bryan Williams
The file you are asking for is available at:
http://ftp.census.gov/geo/www/gazetteer/places.html
It is a 800k CSV file listing lat/lon for every zip code in the nation. Read the
file specs closely, the lat/lon are coded in a fairly weird way. They also have
available an 8 meg file listing lat/lon for every incorporated place name.
There is also some useful information available at:
http://mapping.usgs.gov/www/gnis/gnisform.html
but the server is apparently down and I don't remember EXACTLY why I had it
bookmarked :)
all...@mnsinc.com (David Allen) wrote:
--
Bryan
Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend.
Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read.
(addresses munged to avoid spammers)
Stan Thomas
Paul Kunkel
In article <6562km$n...@mtinsc05.worldnet.att.net>, all...@mnsinc.com
(David Allen) says...
>
> AutoDesk's Mapguide Utility somehow can specify a decimal Lon/Lat
> coordinate for any street address in the US, to 8 decimal places of a
> degree. I don't necessarily need that detail, but would like to have
> a quick way of computing distances between field locations and
> homes/offices of members of our professional baseball umpires
> association. Stop shaking your head.
Eight decimal places, you don't say? This reminds me of a
trigonometry test I graded last year. A question asked for the altitude
of a helicopter. The answer was given to the nearest angstrom.
By my figures, 10^(-8) degrees of latitude is about one millimeter,
or roughly the height of the American League strike zone.
Kunkel