Geocoding is a method to find the coordinates (e.g. latitude and longitude) of a data record (e.g. an address or zip code) or of an object which represents some other geographic data (e.g. country name, landmark, etc).
Geocoding is the process of finding associated geographic coordinates (often expressed as latitude and longitude) from other geographic data, such as street addresses, or ZIP codes (postal codes). With geographic coordinates the features can be mapped and entered into Geographic Information Systems, or the coordinates can be embedded into media such as digital photographs via geotagging.
The opposite, reverse-geocoding, is finding a textual location (such as a street address), from geographic coordinates.
A common use case is to find a record based on given address data - like city name, zip code, street name and house number or special points of interest - in a geo database which holds information about longitude, latitude or nodes in a road network for each address record.
Geocoding in software programs is often either supported as an interactive dialog based process, as an automatic batch process for geocoding mass data or a combination of both methods. Geocoding can be a highly sophisticated task as it often has to deal with unstructured or poorly structured address data and ambiguous or localized representations of addresses. The quality of geocoding results depends not only on the underlying geo database but also on the quality of string parsing and search algorithms which try to find a matching record as unambiguously as possible.
Geocoding is an important feature in - for example - Geographic Information Systems (GIS), Navigation Systems, Route Planning or Transport Management Systems.
The process of adding geographical identification metadata to various media such as photographs or videos, websites, SMS messages, QR codes, or RSS feeds. This data usually consists of latitude and longitude coordinates, though they can also include altitude, bearing, distance, accuracy data, and place names.
google-geocoding-api
