Case Study: Digital Geography improves address resolution with Placekey Plugins

How Placekey Plugins Helped the Creator of Digital Geography Blog Build a Travel Application

Digital Geography, a blog run by geospatial developer Riccardo Klinger, faced significant challenges in building a travel application for a client due to odd street naming conventions, multi-language shop names, and the difficulties of address and POI matching. Their initial solution using OpenStreetMap and a local database was computationally expensive and resulted in a poor user experience, with users often not seeing all relevant information for a location. This led them to seek a solution from Placekey.

By implementing the Placekey API, Digital Geography was able to easily append universal location identifiers to addresses, resolving their matching and normalization issues. Riccardo Klinger further developed two Placekey plugins for QGIS and ArcGIS, making the technology accessible to non-technical GIS users and dramatically reducing development time; the initial plugin was built in just three days. The solution improved data accuracy by helping to identify invalid addresses and freed up significant machine resources, allowing users to integrate Placekey directly into their existing software workflows.

Digital Geography

Riccardo Klinger

Geospatial Developer and Author