geocode-sparcs 0.2.1

geocode_sparcs is a program for geocoding health data from New York State’s Statewide Planning and Research Cooperative System (SPARCS) with a local installation of Pelias. It might also be useful as a Pelias wrapper for other regions and datasets, but for now at least, the focus is on SPARCS. The various kinds of fallback logic and string munging the program implements are specifically to improve performance on SPARCS.

Install geocode_sparcs via pip with the command pip install geocode_sparcs. Python dependencies are automatically installed, but you’ll need to set up Pelias with the instructions for Pelias on Docker. You can use the provided Pelias project directory; just be sure to set DATA_DIR in .env to where you want to store all the data. Setting up Pelias with this configuration can take a few hours of downloading and processing.

Once Pelias is up, you can geocode with the command python3 -m geocode_sparcs, passing in addresses to geocode through standard input. Each address should be a JSON object on its own line (per JSON Lines) with the keys line1, city, and zip. The values should all be strings (even zip) and are presumed to come from the columns PAT_ADDR_LINE1, PAT_ADDR_CITY, and PAT_ADDR_ZIP5 in a SPARCS_LOCATION file; it is also assumed that you already checked that PAT_ADDR_ST is equal to NY for each case. Here’s an example (with addresses that aren’t actually from SPARCS, since that’s protected health information):

$ echo '{"line1": "405 East 42nd St", "city": "New York", "zip": "10017"}' >>input.txt
$ echo '{"line1": "351 Northern Blvd", "city": "Albany", "zip": "12204"}' >>input.txt
$ python3 -m geocode_sparcs <input.txt

The output is also in JSON Lines. By default, the first features result from Pelias for each input is returned without further processing. See python3 -m geocode_sparcs --help for command-line options.