whereabouts 0.3.14

Open source geocoding in Python

Whereabouts

A light-weight, fast geocoder for Python using DuckDB. Try it out online at Huggingface

Description

Whereabouts is an open-source geocoding library for Python, allowing you to geocode and standardize address data all within your own environment:

Features:

• Two line installation
• No additional database setup required. Uses DuckDB to run all queries
• No need to send data to an external geocoding API
• Fast (Geocode 1000s / sec depending on your setup)
• Robust to typographical errors

Requirements

• Python 3.8+
• requirements.txt (found in repo)

Installation: via PIP

whereabouts can be installed either from this repo using pip / uv / conda

pip install whereabouts

Download a geocoder database or create your own

You will need a geocoding database to match addresses against. You can either download a pre-built database or create your own using a dataset of high quality reference addresses for a given country, state or other geographic region.

Option 1: Download a geocoder database

Pre-built geocoding database are available from Huggingface. The list of available databases can be found here

As an example, to install the small size geocoder database for all of Australia:

python -m whereabouts download au_all_sm

Option 2: Create a geocoder database

Rather than using a pre-built database, you can create your own geocoder database if you have your own address file. This file should be a single csv or parquet file with the following columns:

Column name	Description	Data type
ADDRESS_DETAIL_PID	Unique identifier for address	int
ADDRESS_LABEL	The full address	str
ADDRESS_SITE_NAME	Name of the site. This is usually null	str
LOCALITY_NAME	Name of the suburb or locality	str
POSTCODE	Postcode of address	int
STATE	State	str
LATITUDE	Latitude of geocoded address	float
LONGITUDE	Longitude of geocoded address	float

These fields should be specified in a setup.yml file. Once the setup.yml is created and a reference dataset is available, the geocoding database can be created:

python -m whereabouts setup_geocoder setup.yml

Geocoding examples

Geocode a list of addresses

from whereabouts.Matcher import Matcher

matcher = Matcher(db_name='au_all_sm')
matcher.geocode(addresslist, how='standard')

For more accurate geocoding you can use trigram phrases rather than token phrases. Note you will need one of the large databases to use trigram geocoding.

matcher.geocode(addresslist, how='trigram')

How it works

The algorithm employs simple record linkage techniques, making it suitable for implementation in around 10 lines of SQL. It is based on the following papers

• https://arxiv.org/abs/1708.01402
• https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.09691

Documentation

Work in progress: https://whereabouts.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

To do:

• Additional countries (US, NZ, France, UK)
• Geocode street corners
• Geocode individual suburb, street name pairs (without house numbers)