Welcome to the PAGC Project
The Postal Address Geo-Coder (or PAGC) is a library and a CGI based web service written in ANSI C that uses an address-ranged street network shapefile along with one or more postal addresses and provides the longitude/latitude coordinates of each matched address. PAGC has been designed to make it easily extensible to the postal address structure of many Western countries. Out of the box it works with publicly available road network data sets from the US (shapefiles of the US Census Bureau’s TIGER/Line data) and Canada (shapefiles of Statistics Canada’s Road Network Files). In addition to postal address geocoding, PAGC is now able to do street intersection geocoding and land parcel geocoding. PAGC is Open Source, and is currently released under the GNU Lesser General Public License. PAGC has been built and tested under GNU-Linux and Microsoft Windows, and it should also be possible to build it under Mac OS X and many other operating systems since it is written in ANSI C.
Now that PAGC has been converted to a C library, one current objective of the project is to develop language bindings to Java, Perl, Python, and Ruby. We strongly encourage those interested in developing language bindings for their favorite language to join the PAGC development team. The best way to do this is to join the project’s development list and sending a message expressing your interest.
In terms of functionality, the goal moving forward is to allow for reverse geocoding (providing a latitude/longitude coordinate pair returns a street address) and landmark geocoding (e.g., “Empire State Building, New York”).
News
November 23, 2008
The PAGC web site has finally been updated to relect the many changes that have occured since this past August. The main change is the transition of PAGC from a command line program to a library and a web service. Longer-term, the library (libpagc) will be the basis for a new set of command line tools. However, in the interim, people interested in using the old command line tools for batch geo-coding of addresses to create a point shapefile layer are encouraged to download the 0.1.2 version of PAGC, which is identified as “pagc_old” on the project’s SourceForge download page.
December 15, 2006
The PAGC web site has been redesigned to make it both standards complient, and easier to update in the future.
December 5, 2006
A user mailing list for PAGC has been started. The purpose of this list is to help users find answers to their questions concerning the use of PAGC, finding bugs and usage issues, and determine what needs to be done to extend the use of PAGC to road networks of different countries.
December 3, 2006
The PAGC Project Team is pleased to announce the first full public release of PAGC (v0.1.2).
February 4, 2006
The preview release of PAGC (v0.1.0) is now available.
