Re: PostGIS: Approximating a house number from street address range - Mailing list pgsql-general

On 10/12/2011 06:38 PM, Andy Colson wrote:

On 10/12/2011 06:29 PM, Andy Colson wrote:

On 10/12/2011 01:01 PM, René Fournier wrote:

Hi,

I'm developing a reverse-geocoder for Canada. So far, given a lat/lng, I can find the nearest street (line segment), which includes line segment direction and address ranges for both sides of the street. I'm now trying to figure out the best way to programmatically approximate the nearest house number to the given lat/lng point.

Here's an example of a row containing the street data:

-[ RECORD 1 ]-

[...]

l_adddirfg | Same Direction

l_hnumf | 3219

l_hnuml | 3235

l_stname_c | Breen Road North-west

r_adddirfg | Same Direction

r_hnumf | 3224

r_hnuml | 3236

r_stname_c | Breen Road North-west

the_geom | 0105000020E610000001000000010200000002000000B0F6990E78885CC088DF2B5F3C8C49400875B39A89885CC0A0BCA6AC4B8C4940

So, given a lat/lng coordinate that lies near the "the_geom" line segment, a person could tell visually which side of the street the point is on (left or right side), and how far along the segment it is -- thereby approximating a house number. For example, if the point lies on the right side, three-quarters down the street, I would use the fields r_hnumf (right side, first number) and r_hnuml (right side, last number)... The street address is probably close to:

3232 Breen Road North-west

What I'm looking for is a best practice in either computing/approximating this in PostGIS (which I'm new to), or in the application layer once the row is fetched.

Any ideas? Thanks!

...Rene

Is this the only format you have the data in? If you had two rectangles (one for each side of the street), and each rect had an address, this would be a lot simpler. Is that geom a line? rectangle? Do you have a layer that has lots or parcels?

-Andy

Ah, its a line:

MULTILINESTRING((-114.1323277 51.0955924,-114.1333987 51.0960594000001))

But then you have a problem. If this is a street line, and its going north/south, great, but what if its going east/west? What's the right hand side of a horizontal line?

-Andy

Wow.  Neet.  I Learned something new.  PostGIS never ceases to amaze me.

Find the point on a line closest to a click point:

http://postgis.refractions.net/docs/ST_Line_Locate_Point.html


Then use  http://postgis.refractions.net/documentation/manual-svn/ST_Azimuth.html to find the angle between two points.

The angle can tell you if the click point is left/right (or above/below) the street.

I googled two things that might offer you more help: "postgis line direction" and "postgis point closest to line".

Ok, I'll quit spamming the list now.  (Oh yeah, I have some med's I can sell ya!)

-Andy