MK Geocoder

Geocoding is a way to find the latitude and longitude information from an address. Given a address, how can you even spot it on a map programatically? Impossible, two years ago. But now with Geocoding, you can get the latitude and longitude from a “well formed” address.

There are some free websites and some paid websites that do bulk geocoding for you. In most cases, they are too pricey and they tend to use one of the publicly available APIs.

All the three biggies, Microsoft, Yahoo and Google have geocoding APIs. Yahoo is said to be more accurate for US based addresses while Google covers the whole world (? Gasp, World domination?)

I was looking for a free implementation of a geocoding library in either Objective C or C# and I found one. However, it didn’t provide a UI. So I wrote a nice wrapper around this library and it’s available to you for free.

Downloads

The entire source code is available on codeplex.
Need just the binaries? Check out here

How to use

Prepare a file containing addresses one line each. Choose that file into MK Geocoder. Fill in your Google API Key. Click start.
MK Geocoder will create a file <your file name>.mkgeocoded.txt and <your file name>.mkgeocoded_exceptions.txt

You can change addresses in the exceptions and re-import the file.

Happy Geocoding!