Intro to Geocoding with the Data Science Toolkit

This two-hour workshop will introduce address geocoding - the process of determining the geographic location of a street address. The first part of this workshop will be an introduction to the process of geocoding and the various online and desktop tools available for geocoding. We will demonstrate this process using the Data Science Toolkit, a free and open source tool that includes an online geocoding service as well as a version of the tool that can be installed locally. We will discuss methods for geocoding anywhere from one to one million plus addresses. The second part of the workshop will be an optional tutorial in which we will work with you to geocode sample addresses (feel free to bring your own data if you have it). Attendees who wish to follow along should bring their laptop, preferably with Python installed. We recommend the Anaconda distribution since it will include all the needed Python libraries. Windows PC users should install cURL, a command line tool for fetching data via URLs, on their laptop before the workshop.