Description
A Python library for offline reverse geocoding. It improves on an existing library called reverse_geocode developed by Richard Penman. The library was built with speed in mind and it can geocode 10 million GPS coordinates in under 30 seconds on a machine with 8 cores.
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README
Reverse Geocoder
A Python library for offline reverse geocoding. It improves on an existing library called reverse_geocode developed by Richard Penman.
UPDATE (15-Sep-16): v1.5.1 released! See release notes below.
About
Ajay Thampi | @thampiman | opensignal.com | ajaythampi.com
Features
- Besides city/town and country code, this library also returns the nearest latitude and longitude and also administrative regions 1 and 2.
- This library also uses a parallelised implementation of K-D trees which promises an improved performance especially for large inputs.
By default, the K-D tree is populated with cities that have a population > 1000. The source of the data is GeoNames. You can also load a custom data source so long as it is a comma-separated file with header (like rg_cities1000.csv), containing the following columns:
lat
: Latitudelon
: Longitudename
: Name of placeadmin1
: Admin 1 regionadmin2
: Admin 2 regioncc
: ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country code
For usage instructions, see below.
Installation
For first time installation,
$ pip install reverse_geocoder
Or upgrade an existing installation using,
$ pip install --upgrade reverse_geocoder
Package can be found on PyPI.
Dependencies
- scipy
- numpy
Release Notes
- v1.0 (27-Mar-15) - First version with support for only Python2
- v1.1 (28-Mar-15) - Fix for issue #1 by Brandon
- v1.2 (30-Mar-15) - Support for Python 3, conversion of Geodetic coordinates to ECEF for use in K-D trees to find nearest neighbour using the Euclidean distance function. This release fixes issues #2 and #8. Special thanks to David for his help in partly fixing #2.
- v1.3 (11-Apr-15) - This release fixes issues #9, #10, #11 and #12. License has been changed from MIT to LGPL (see #12).
- v1.4 (08-Jul-16) - Included numpy and scipy as dependencies in setup.
- v1.5 (15-Sep-16) - Support for custom data source and fixes for issues #16 and #24. Hat tip to Jason and Gregoire.
- v1.5.1 (15-Sep-16) - Fix for #26.
Usage
The library supports two modes:
- Mode 1: Single-threaded K-D Tree (similar to reverse_geocode)
- Mode 2: Multi-threaded K-D Tree (default)
import reverse_geocoder as rg
coordinates = (51.5214588,-0.1729636),(9.936033, 76.259952),(37.38605,-122.08385)
results = rg.search(coordinates) # default mode = 2
print results
The above code will output the following:
[{'name': 'Bayswater',
'cc': 'GB',
'lat': '51.51116',
'lon': '-0.18426',
'admin1': 'England',
'admin2': 'Greater London'},
{'name': 'Cochin',
'cc': 'IN',
'lat': '9.93988',
'lon': '76.26022',
'admin1': 'Kerala',
'admin2': 'Ernakulam'},
{'name': 'Mountain View',
'cc': 'US',
'lat': '37.38605',
'lon': '-122.08385',
'admin1': 'California',
'admin2': 'Santa Clara County'}]
If you'd like to use the single-threaded K-D tree, set mode = 1 as follows:
results = rg.search(coordinates,mode=1)
To use a custom data source for geocoding, you can load the file in-memory and pass it to the library as follows:
import io
import reverse_geocoder as rg
geo = rg.RGeocoder(mode=2, verbose=True, stream=io.StringIO(open('custom_source.csv', encoding='utf-8').read()))
coordinates = (51.5214588,-0.1729636),(9.936033, 76.259952),(37.38605,-122.08385)
results = geo.query(coordinates)
As mentioned above, the custom data source must be comma-separated with a header as rg_cities1000.csv.
Performance
The performance of modes 1 and 2 are plotted below for various input sizes.
[Performance Comparison](performance.png)
Mode 2 runs ~2x faster for very large inputs (10M coordinates).
Acknowledgements
- Major inspiration is from Richard Penman's reverse_geocode library
- Parallelised implementation of K-D Trees is extended from this article by Sturla Molden
- Geocoded data is from GeoNames
License
Copyright (c) 2015 Ajay Thampi and contributors. This code is licensed under the LGPL License.
*Note that all licence references and agreements mentioned in the Reverse Geocoder README section above
are relevant to that project's source code only.