A new geocoder for 2015

[davidchiles]

I want to undertake writing a new geocoder for this year. In the past we've had a lot of hardcoded values and suspicious looking math.

The plan so far

A simple geocoder that takes in strings and turns them into latitude and longitude values as best as possible. This should work for both art and camps.

Todo

• Parse all formats of location strings
• New translation functions (playa coordinates to lat lon) using Turf.
• Use generated geo files from layout.js
• Support plaza and portal addresses like Plaza & 7:30 Public Plaza & 3:00 Portal & 9:00

[chrisballinger]

I think William may have some of these algorithms already written but in an OpenOffice spreadsheet:
http://www.wkeller.net/BRC-GPS/2007/brc-gps.2007.ods

Are you thinking command line tool or single-page web app?

edit: it would be easier if we could use it via command line to invoke automatically during our metadata scrape cron job.

[davidchiles]

I'm thinking of a command line tool.

I think in the future it would be great if we could incorporate the work in the ods file into this process as well. So that the input would just be the parameters necessary to 'create' the city and everything is derived from that.

But for now I'll use the output from William, the geo files, to do the geocoding.

[OnlyInAmerica]

If Turf sways you toward writing this as a Node application we can deploy it to AWS Lambda. This might be a good fit since we're just hitting an API, processing the result, and depositing the result to S3.

The "command line tool" style would be right at home in that environment.