Geocoding Addresses in Ireland
I’ve got a nice application that I have built and been using for Auctioneers and Estate Agents that allows them to manage their property website, which I have built up and upgraded over the past 6 years. The latest version is quite advanced and we are constantly upgrading it with new technologies available. The feature list usually comes from the clients we have using it but I do visualise some of them in the most bizarre places. 
Anyway, the latest one I’ve been considering is automatically pinpointing a property on a google map, yahoo map or a map24 map (whichever we decide to stick with long term – see this post for more on the differences). Currently, you type in the address of the property, features, pricing and click on the location of the property on the map, which in turn returns the coordinates that get saved to the database. However, there has to be an easier way of doing this. I’ve done a bit fair bit of research into Geocoding in Ireland and there doesn’t seem to be an easy, cost effective and accurate way to do this. I’ve found the following on my travels around the web…
John Handelaar – The Holy Grail of Irish Mapping
John has successfully hacked the Lycos Route Planner in order to get the coordinates and plot them on a map. That’s great. It works. But can others use it? Does it violate usage agreements? Will it always be available? I’m well impressed with this that it works but to use this method on an ongoing basis, I wouldn’t feel too happy. Someone made an interesting comment on his site that he should possibly run an application to feed addresses into his hack and generate his own geocoding database! Lycos would get suspicious after X amount of requests I’d say. This hack of an application does quite well at getting down to a particular address at street level. It was Google Maps that failed to display the map of the street I was looking for since they didn’t have the area fully covered.
Google AJAX Map Search Wizard
While browsing last night, I came across this beta application from Google, thanks to Cormac for leading me in the right direction. This seems like a nice application but being Google, they really fall behind when it comes to providing Ireland with up to date services. It really all boils down to the potential market in this country I suppose – 4m compared to the UK with 60m. Why should they bother? Well, they save a lot by putting their taxes through Ireland! I did some searches and route planning through this application and wasn’t too impressed. I searched for O’Connell Street, Dublin, Ireland and I got some place in California. So, I moved back a step and searched for Dublin, Ireland and this time got Mespil Road in Dublin. I then clicked the directions link, which launched up their main maps site. The best directions I could find was from Dublin, Ireland to Navan, Meath, Ireland. It couldn’t find streets within either of these areas, which basically makes this service fairly useless in Ireland.
Geo Directory Ireland – An Post and OSI Project
This is the official directory of addresses in Ireland, run by An Post and Ordinance Survey Ireland (OSI). It is possible to purchase the geodirectory for your own use but the pricing page on their site is not very self explanatory, in my opinion. It looks to me that if you want to make 575,000 requests for addresses, it will cost you €44,375 plus a user fee as well. That’s annoying. Although you have to pay for this service, it is probably the most accurate you can find out there. Other databases around the world are probably being fed from this one. Maybe Google should buy the database from them?
Anyway, this got me thinking about 1) getting this into my application above in a cost effective and accurate manner, and 2) if I have a way of doing it for my own application, offer it to the public to use and possibly an API as well. More research found a company that provides a very accurate geocoding directory of Ireland. I did some tests on it and it came out on top. They have a couple of API’s available – free and paid – and I’m looking at integrating their services into my application and possibly building a standalone application that others can use. So, my question to you, would you be interested in this service being freely available to the Irish public and possibly have an API made easily available to you for integration into your own apps? If so, let me know your thoughts with a comment below.
I won’t pass out the name of the company I have found until I get a bit more research done on pricing, services, etc. but drop me a mail if you are looking for something like this for your own site. If you can work with AJAX API’s like Google Maps, you should be able to work with this one that I found. I’ll provide a full review of them when I get to talk to their sales team and find out the limitations to the free version and the benefits to the paid.
Thanks for reading! 