Map Scripting 101

Chapter 3. GEOCODING

I've demonstrated some fun map examples in the first two chapters of this book, but there's been an elephant in the room. Those latitude and longitude points I explained in Describe a Point on the Earth in Describe a Point on the Earth are obviously useful to a computer, but not to humans. How often have you been invited to a party at a location designated by only geographic coordinates?

In this chapter, I'll show how you can take something that makes sense to you—addresses, city names, and even postal codes—and turn them into the latitude and longitude points that Mapstraction needs. The conversion is called geocoding, and we'll ...