geocoder: an R package to store and access geographic data in MongoDB

Geocodes (Goldberg, Wilson, and Knoblock 2007) are spatial references which are used to identify points or boundaries in a geographic coordinate system. Finding geocodes is a cumbersome and repeated task for data scientists. In the case of the United Kingdom, despite the availability of “open geography portal” (National Statistics 2016), data scientists need to locate the relevant source, which could be typically an ESRI shape or sometimes a comma separated values (CSV) file. In the case of those who use R as a data science tool, this also means processing these files repeatedly. Having these geocodes handy which can be easily accessed is what geospatial database management systems (DBMS) such as PostGIS and MongoDB should be doing. The idea of having an R package that can fascilitate this is the reason for a missing R package called geocoder. In the age of availability of wide range of SQL/NoSQL and other big data oriented DBMS’es, finding geocodes should be easier