Geocoding in Stata

[Ei Thandar Myint]

I have address variable (~700k observations) and I would like to get latitude and longitude of the address. I tried geocode command in Stata and I don't think it's working any longer. Is there a Stata command to do what I want to do? I can't seem to find it.

[Daniel Schaefer]

So I did some googling after reading this post and long story short there may be some third party support for this kind of thing (see here and here).

I am surprised to hear there was ever such a command in Stata and I am not surprised that it is no longer supported. Writing such a command would pose a significant engineering challenge, as would maintaining such a command. You would need a data provider with an API that supports this kind of address lookup, who is collecting and continually updating this difficult-to-obtain data, and who is giving it away essentially for free. Sure, google maps might be the API for this (I'm honestly not sure) but now you have to contend with the fact that google can start charging for this kind of data, restrict access, or even just change the technical details of their API at any time, and your command is broken. So, if you want this kind of black magic command to work constantly over time, you need a well paid developer to maintain it, and even that is not any guarantee long term. ArcGIS might be able to do something like this (again, I don't know) but not for free bundled with Stata.

As far as I know, If you want to get this done and you can't find a third party command that works, you will need to find a data provider and write an API interface yourself. This is, of course, possible. But it will take some technical expertise and a good deal of time and energy. Alternatively, you could start thinking out of the box. If you are US based, maybe the US Census API will allow you to merge a zip code with a census tract or something. It's not point data, but it's still geocoded. If someone else knows of an out-of-the box, easy way to do what you are asking, I will seriously consider leaving my academic position to study magic with the Illuminati, because apparently magic exists and my life would be much easier if I knew how to use it.