libpostal

libpostal: international street address NLP

libpostal is a C library for parsing/normalizing street addresses around the world using statistical NLP and open data. The goal of this project is to understand location-based strings in every language, everywhere. For a more comprehensive overview of the research behind libpostal, be sure to check out the (lengthy) introductory blog posts:

• Original post: Statistical NLP on OpenStreetMap
• Follow-up for 1.0 release: Statistical NLP on OpenStreetMap: Part 2

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Addresses and the locations they represent are essential for any application dealing with maps (place search, transportation, on-demand/delivery services, check-ins, reviews). Yet even the simplest addresses are packed with local conventions, abbreviations and context, making them difficult to index/query effectively with traditional full-text search engines. This library helps convert the free-form addresses that humans use into clean normalized forms suitable for machine comparison and full-text indexing. Though libpostal is not itself a full geocoder, it can be used as a preprocessing step to make any geocoding application smarter, simpler, and more consistent internationally.

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The core library is written in pure C. Language bindings for Python, Ruby, Go, Java, PHP, and NodeJS are officially supported and it's easy to write bindings in other languages.

Sponsors

If your company is using libpostal, consider asking your organization to sponsor the project. Interpreting what humans mean when they refer to locations is far from a solved problem, and sponsorships help us pursue new frontiers in geospatial NLP. As a sponsor, your company logo will appear prominently on the Github repo page along with a link to your site. Sponsorship info

Backers

Individual users can also help support open geo NLP research by making a monthly donation:

Installation (Mac/Linux)

Before you install, make sure you have the following prerequisites:

On Ubuntu/Debian

sudo apt-get install -y curl build-essential autoconf automake libtool pkg-config

On CentOS/RHEL

sudo yum install curl autoconf automake libtool pkgconfig

On macOS

Install with one command via MacPorts:

port install libpostal

Or with Homebrew:

brew install libpostal

To compile the C library from source:

If you're using an M1 Mac, add --disable-sse2 to the ./configure command. This will result in poorer performance but the build will succeed.

…

libpostal has support for pkg-config, so you can use the pkg-config to print the flags needed to link your program against it:

pkg-config --cflags libpostal         # print compiler flags
pkg-config --libs libpostal           # print linker flags
pkg-config --cflags --libs libpostal  # print both

For example, if you write a program called app.c, you can compile it like this:

gcc app.c `pkg-config --cflags --libs libpostal`

Installation (Windows)

MSys2/MinGW

For Windows the build procedure currently requires MSys2 and MinGW. This can be downloaded from http://msys2.org. Please follow the instructions on the MSys2 website for installation.

Please ensure Msys2 is up-to-date by running:

pacman -Syu

Install the following prerequisites:

pacman -S autoconf automake curl git make libtool gcc mingw-w64-x86_64-gcc

Then to build the C library:

git clone https://github.com/openvenues/libpostal
cd libpostal
cp -rf windows/* ./
./bootstrap.sh
./configure --datadir=[...some dir with a few GB of space...]
make -j4
make install

Notes: When setting the datadir, the C: drive would be entered as /c. The libpostal build script automatically add libpostal on the end of the path, so '/c' would become C:\libpostal\ on Windows.

The compiled .dll will be in the src/.libs/ directory and should be called libpostal-1.dll.

If you require a .lib import library to link this to your application. You can generate one using the Visual Studio lib.exe tool and the libpostal.def definition file:

lib.exe /def:libpostal.def /out:libpostal.lib /machine:x64

Installation with an alternative data model

An alternative data model is available for libpo