Geocoding with locator.stanford.edu services

The most recent documentation for accessing and using geocoding services from ArcGIS Desktop, ArcGIS Pro, Python, R and other venues, can be found at: https://locator.stanford.edu (Public facing)

The Main REST API Service Endpoint is at: https://locator.stanford.edu/arcgis (accessible only on campus, or through VPN)

Introduction

Geocoding, in the context of this service, is the use of reference datasets (such as street networks, administrative boundaries and gazetteers) to convert text-based locations (such as street addresses, administrative units or placenames) into explicit locations, or latitude/longitude coordinate pairs, in most use cases. These resulting coordinates are often used to extract values from other datasets, based upon location, or for measurement of proximity to other features and phenomena.

The Stanford Geospatial Center has been developing our internal geocoding infrastructure, specifically for research-based use cases. This is our ALPHA Geocoding Server, based upon Esri's ArcGIS Server technology. The server currently provides geocoding services for:

• US Street Addresses
• Street Addresses, Place Names, Administrative Unit centroids, and more, for North and South America
• Reverse Geocoding - Provide a coordinate pair, and the server will return the nearest valid feature from a number of feature types.

Data documentation

Links to full documentation for the data and "locators" used in this service can be found, below:

• StreetMap Premium, Latin America
• StreetMap Premium, North America
• StreetMap Premium, Europe (Service launching early 2022)
• StreetMap Premium Asia & Pacific (Service launching early 2022)
• StreetMap Premium, Africa (Service launching early 2022)  

Some important points about the current service:

• The service should not be used with PHI, Protected Health Information (PHI), or other types of High Risk data. Users wishing to work with data related to human subject should consult with IRB for policies concerning de-identification of data and other privacy issues. In general, information passed to the locator.stanford.edu service should not contain data that can be directly linked to a specific individual.
• The locator.stanford.edu service uses https TLS/SSL encryption for all traffic between client and server
• The locator.stanford.edu service does not log geocodes made against the service
• Data passed to the service for augmentation is not retained
• The locator.stanford.edu geocoding service is hosted on Stanford hardware within the Stanford Network.
• This service is meant to be used for bulk geocoding of thousands to millions of placenames and/or addresses
• The service is provided for use by Stanford researchers, but is in ALPHA, currently, and does not carry any Service Level Agreement, or guarantees of performance or uptime
• The service is in development, and may be inaccessible at some times. When maintenance requires the services to be turned off, we will post messaging for users to our stanfordgis@lists.stanford.edu list, as well as our Slack, which you can join at https://stanford-geospatial.slack.com