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I am trying to develop a java application that can reverse geocode US addresses to latitude and longitude using the TIGER\Line shapefiles and geodatabase files with GeoTools (GeoTools The Open Source Java GIS Toolkit).

I can see that the ADDRFEAT shapefiles have street names etc, but how do i link these shapefiles to those with latitude and longitude?

Is this even possible?

Hector
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    You should not have to reverse engineer anything. That shapefiles you have will contain the spatial coordinates. Also, this question may have already been answerer for you here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2044876/does-anyone-know-of-a-library-in-java-that-can-parse-esri-shapefiles – Mike Jablonski Mar 27 '15 at 21:13
  • thanks for responding. Indeed that question you quote did help me, but it doesnt show how to convert an address to latitude longitude, how to get the feature names from the shapefile features and neither does the geotools docs i have found so far. I cannot match the ADDRFEAT record layout found in the TIGER\Line docs to the features extracted from the shapefiles themselves. – Hector Mar 28 '15 at 07:53
  • If you are doing this for fun, enjoy. :) But if you just want to get it done, you could use the [SmartyStreets API](https://smartystreets.com/docs/address). Here is a [Demo](https://smartystreets.com/demo?street=110+William+St%2C+28th+Floor&city=New+York&state=NY&zipcode=10038). – SunSparc Mar 31 '15 at 17:32
  • i have 90,000 addresses to GeoCode and i dont believe in paying, also i dont understand why sites like google maps limit machine calls to their maps site. – Hector Mar 31 '15 at 20:45

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Converting postal addresses to lat/lon values is the geocoding itself. "Reverse geocoding" refers to the process of finding a postal address for a given lat/lon location.

The process of finding lat/lon location for a given postal address (i.e. geocoding) is actually quite complex. Here is an article I wrote on in in Dr. Dobbs.

Michael Diomin
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  • nice article. I have so far combined Geotools and Jgeocoder and downloaded the 2014 TIGER\line files (ADDRFEAT). I have 90,000+ US Addresses to geocode and so far enjoying the challenge. – Hector Mar 30 '15 at 19:41