{photon} is a simple interface and setup manager of the
photon OpenStreetMap geocoder. It features
unstructured, structured, and reverse geocoding. The package allows
requests to the public API but shines at setting up local instances to
enable high-performance offline geocoding.
To install the package from CRAN:
install.packages("photon")You can install the development version of photon from GitHub with:
# install.packages("remotes")
remotes::install_github("jslth/photon")When loading {photon}, the package assumes that you want send
geocoding requests to the public photon API. If you want to change this,
you can use the workhorse function new_photon(). Otherwise, you can
directly start geocoding.
library(photon)
places <- c("Paris", "Shenzen", "Sao Paulo", "Kinshasa")
cities1 <- geocode(places, layer = "city")
cities1
#> Simple feature collection with 4 features and 12 fields
#> Geometry type: POINT
#> Dimension: XY
#> Bounding box: xmin: -46.63338 ymin: -23.55065 xmax: 114.0545 ymax: 48.8535
#> Geodetic CRS: WGS 84
#> # A tibble: 4 × 13
#> idx osm_type osm_id osm_key osm_value type countrycode name state country
#> <int> <chr> <int> <chr> <chr> <chr> <chr> <chr> <chr> <chr>
#> 1 1 R 71525 place city city FR Paris Isla… France
#> 2 2 R 3464353 place city city CN Shen… Guan… China
#> 3 3 R 298285 place municipa… city BR São … São … Brazil
#> 4 4 R 388103 bounda… administ… city CD Kins… Kins… Democr…
#> # ℹ 3 more variables: extent <list>, county <chr>, geometry <POINT [°]>Structured geocoding means providing address / place details in a structured format.
places_str <- data.frame(
city = places,
countrycode = c("FR", "CN", "BR", "CD")
)
cities2 <- structured(places_str)
cities2
#> Simple feature collection with 4 features and 13 fields
#> Geometry type: POINT
#> Dimension: XY
#> Bounding box: xmin: -35.76483 ymin: -5.894168 xmax: 114.0545 ymax: 46.91503
#> Geodetic CRS: WGS 84
#> # A tibble: 4 × 14
#> idx osm_type osm_id osm_key osm_value type postcode countrycode name
#> <int> <chr> <int> <chr> <chr> <chr> <chr> <chr> <chr>
#> 1 1 R 2706247 place village city 71150 FR Pari…
#> 2 2 R 3464353 place city city <NA> CN Shen…
#> 3 3 R 301120 place municipality city 59460-0… BR São …
#> 4 4 R 388103 boundary administrati… city <NA> CD Kins…
#> # ℹ 5 more variables: county <chr>, state <chr>, country <chr>, extent <list>,
#> # geometry <POINT [°]>Reverse geocoding means taking point geometries and returning their addresses or place names.
cities3 <- reverse(cities1$geometry, layer = "city")
cities3
#> Simple feature collection with 4 features and 12 fields
#> Geometry type: POINT
#> Dimension: XY
#> Bounding box: xmin: -46.63338 ymin: -23.55065 xmax: 114.0545 ymax: 48.8535
#> Geodetic CRS: WGS 84
#> # A tibble: 4 × 13
#> idx osm_type osm_id osm_key osm_value type countrycode name state country
#> <int> <chr> <int> <chr> <chr> <chr> <chr> <chr> <chr> <chr>
#> 1 1 R 71525 place city city FR Paris Isla… France
#> 2 2 R 3464353 place city city CN Shen… Guan… China
#> 3 3 R 298285 place municipa… city BR São … São … Brazil
#> 4 4 R 388103 bounda… administ… city CD Kins… Kins… Democr…
#> # ℹ 3 more variables: extent <list>, county <chr>, geometry <POINT [°]>all.equal(cities1, cities3)
#> [1] TRUE{photon} is designed to facilitate offline geocoding. new_photon()
can install photon locally. The following code would install and start
photon covering the country of Germany in the current working directory.
photon <- new_photon(path = "./photon", region = "Germany")
photon$start()- The
{photon}package by Timothée Giraud interfaces photon but does not allow the setup of local instances and was abandoned a while ago. - The
{revgeo}package by Michael Hudecheck implements reverse geocoding using (among others) photon. - The
{tidygeocoder}and{nominatimlite}packages implement general (OSM) geocoding using web APIs.