In the upcoming Stata Journal I have a paper with a coauthor that lets Stata query Google Maps in order to find latitude and longitude for addresses or other locations, also known as geocoding. What makes this useful is that you can have weird formatting, spelling errors, or missing information in your address or location variable and the program can still geocode it as well as Google Maps can place it on a map.
There's another program that calculates the "Google maps distance" (i.e., actual travel time distance as opposed to as-the-crow-flies geometric distance) between any two addresses. More details can be found here. This is very exciting.
Now you'll want geocode3: http://ideas.repec.org/c/boc/bocode/s457650.html
ReplyDeletegeocode3 is valid for the Google Geocoding API (V3).
Google Geocoding API (V2) ceased as of March 2013.