ReverseGeocode
ReverseGeocode is a tool for quick offline reverse geocoding in Julia.
The tool returns city and country closest to provided latitude/longitude coordinate (WGS84).
Installation
In REPL, simply run
import Pkg; Pkg.add("ReverseGeocode")to install the package.
The reference dataset is download on the first use. To download the data, simply run
julia> using ReverseGeocode
julia> Geocoder();
[ Info: Reference dataset sucessfuly saved in ./data.Usage example:
The decode function works with either single lat/lon point or with an array of points or a Matrix. Lat/lon are assumed to be decimal degrees (WGS84).
using ReverseGeocode, StaticArrays
gc = Geocoder()
# single coordinate
decode(gc, SA[51.45,0.00])
#(country = "United Kingdom", country_code = "GB", city = "Blackheath")
# multiple coordinates
decode(gc, [[34.2,100.00] [50.01,16.35]])
#2-element Array{NamedTuple{(:country, :country_code, :city),Tuple{String,String,String}},1}:
# (country = "China", country_code = "CN", city = "Kequ")
# (country = "Czechia", country_code = "CZ", city = "Ústí nad Orlicí")Note that due to the requirements of the NearestNeighbors library, the dimension of points needs to be set at type level, so use of either StaticArrays or Matrices for input data is recommended.
Description
The package works by searching for the nearest neighbor in the downloaded list of known locations from geonames.org.
As such, it is extremely fast compared to online APIs. This makes it useful for quickly annotating large numbers of points. Additionally, as the labelling runs locally, it can not exhaust limits of free web APIs.
Limitations
Since the reverse geocoding is performed simply by finding the nearest labelled point, the labelling may not return accurate annotations for some points (e.g. points close to borders of two cities or countries may be mislabelled).
Future plans
See the docs.
Acknowledgmenets
- Inspired by the python package reverse_geocode
- Data from geonames.org under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License