Meet the Experts: Dr. Stefan Jünger: bkggeocoder: a geocoding tool for survey data

Описание: Geospatial data has become increasingly widespread in the social sciences. Applications not only extend to the analysis of classical geographical entities (e.g., policy diffusion across spatially proximate countries) but also to analyses of micro-level data, including respondent information from georeferenced surveys or user trace data from social media. Georeferencing of survey and digital behavioral data opens up new possibilities for spatial linking with contextual variables, such as emission levels from industries or traffic, land use indicators, or socio-economic variables. At the same time, spatial linking also creates new challenges, especially regarding data protection issues.

This talk presents current geocoding-related projects at GESIS. It introduces a geocoding tool based on the Federal Agency of Cartography and Geodesy (BKG) data in Germany: the bkggeocoder. The bkggeocoder provides access to the geocoded address database from the BKG via an R interface. Licensed users of the BKG services, such as GESIS, can directly use the BKG’s API to receive geocoded address information in a tidy data table, including important information about data quality. Alternatively, an offline interface provides more fine-grained methods of navigating data protection challenges in cases where an API may not meet a specific project’s requirements for data storage.