reverse geocoding

[ben earnhart]

Folks --

I have a list of latitudes and longitudes, and would like to translate them to states. geocode3 seems to have the capability, but when I attempt to download it from https://ideas.repec.org/c/boc/bocode/s457650.html I get file not found. Also, it's not ideal, since it uses the Google Maps API, thus restricting how many I can grab in a day.

I have shapefiles of the US, and obviously at *some* level spmap is performing what I need in the background. But I can't figure out how to get it to spit out the tabular results instead of pretty maps.

Any ideas are much appreciated.

Thanks,

Ben Earnhart

[Friedrich Huebler]

See http://www.statalist.org/forums/foru...nger-available. Seems it was still available in February 2015.

[Robert Picard]

Ben, what you are looking for is called a spatial join. There was a discussion about this here.

[wbuchanan]

It would probably be easier to do this type of work with Postgres/PostGIS. If either the latitude/longitude pairs or the shape files were created with a different projection the results may not be correct. There are some tools available from the GDAL libraries that can handle reprojecting the shape files. If you needed geocoding capabilities from your local machine, the full PostGIS tiger Geocoder is only about 95GB for the entire U.S. And can support geocoding and reverse geocoding. I recently did that for a project that required geocoding approximately 1.4M addresses and for being something that is free, I could more than live with some of the performance issues.

[ben earnhart]

Turned out that SAS could do it with PROC GINSIDE, I prefer Stata, but in this case SAS actually was faster and easier. It had a dataset that came with it that had boundary files (weird to change lat/long into radians), but it works out of the box.

[Robert Picard]

As I announced here recently, geoinpoly is now available from SSC and should perform the same function as SAS's PROC GINSIDE.