When you’re doing primary research in developing countries, you quickly find that the data can be quite raw and needs some standardization before it can be useful for further development.
I’ve found geocoding addresses to be a low hanging fruit that at least allows you to start seeing some data spatially.
This is how to add coordinates to any list of addresses. It is an easy way to standardize them, so they become useful for modeling and simulation in a geographic information system.
1. Create a table in any spreadsheet software of your choice
The rows should have your address data, the columns should have at least these columns below, also with any other attributes you’d like to track
- name of the point of interest
- address on paper
- city
- state
- longitude (x)
- latitude (y)
2. For each point of interest on the list, find the location in google maps
- Search using the name and whatever street address you have available
- Google maps isn’t infallible, you need to make sure the address you see actually makes sense to be the place of interest
3. Copy the individual coordinates from the url into the columns x, y and z respectively
- For example, in below url from google maps, the coordinates start after the @ sign
- here are the coordinates -> @9.0902696,7.4734101,1467m
- copy 9.0902696 into the x column, 7.4734101 into the y column, 8.05 into the z column
- these are the longitude, latitude and height.
When done, you have a list that is now useful in a geographic information system because it gives it an actual location or reference point on a map. More on this later.
Note: None of this is news, just a necessary step when working with a lot of African(Nigerian) data. For developed countries, tools exist to automatically resolve addresses into their coordinates, because their addressing system is standardized. See post code and zip code for further reading.