Geocoding in the UK

Question

I'm having problems geocoding our contact database. Essentially, very few of the contacts have associated latitude and longitudes. I have tried using both Google and Yahoo. When I run the cron job, I did manage to get it to geocode three addresses -- this tells me that the API calls are working (in the case of google, the key is valid). However, most contacts remain ungeocoded and now the cronjob reports 0 more addresses were successfully coded. I did notice the following error when saving a contact:

Unsupported locale specified to parseStreetAddress: en_GB. Proceeding with en_US locale.

I guess its possible the UK is not supported for geocoding yet. But this raises the following questions: 1) Why does coding work for some contacts, but not the majority? 2) What do other UK civicrm users do about this? And, 3) Geocoding in the UK should be as simple as submitting the postcode and storing the returned lat/long.

What can be done about this problem?

Answer 1

UK geocoding works if you don't use address parsing. In the scheduled job parameters set parse=0 or omit the 'parse' line.

For an explanation of street parsing see the wiki and this blog post

Answer 2

You could also give the OSM Geocoding Extension a shot - although I don't we are not awarae of anyone using it in the UK so far.

Answer 3

I've had success with the systopia.de extension.

You may need to clean up your data a bit. If it works sometimes and not others it's probably a data quality issue.