Offending Geocodes

Through an odd chain of events, I offered to create a map of home addresses of registered sex offenders in the Augusta area. Here is a 1st look:


Since I didn’t want to spend hours on end looking at, or reading about these animals, I went searching for method to take the addresses parsed from the Augusta PD site, convert them to longitude/latitude positions, then plot them on a street map. The site scraping was pretty easy with Perl LWP (although getting useful info out of the HTML exported Word docs the folks at Augusta PD use is a PITA!) and creating a map with pointers through USGS TIGER maps is pretty easy. Just the geocoding part was missing. Dan Egnor to the rescue with his 2002 Google Programming Contest winning code to search the TIGER/Line data and return long/lat for an address. In the great tradition of unix tool chain, his tool takes address on stdin so I can pipe the out put from my screen scrap to it, pipe it through some slice and dice to get a murl file for TIGER and away we go!

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