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Welcome to the apex-geocoding-service. This project holds a bunch of Force.com code that provides address geocoding and legislative data from several free and paid APIs, including Cicero, Yahoo People Finder, Google, Geocoder.us, and Mobile Commons.

We started this work at the 2012 Nonprofit Starter Pack Sprint in San Francisco. The vision for the project is that community members will continue its development so its functionality can eventually be incorporated into the Nonprofit Starter Pack.

Goals for the project:

• Allow database users to select contacts and accounts to geocode and enhance. This would provide address standardization, full 5+4 zip code, lat/lng, county, legislative districts, and other location data.
• Provide a scheduled service that automatically updates geo data in the background. Because few services can geocode or update addresses in bulk, we need to do this gradually, updating addreses from a "queue" of addresses to look up.
• Connect geo data to legislator data, advocacy tools, voting history, and upcoming legislation.
• Make all this very easy to configure and maintain.

What we have so far:

• Classes that get back data from Cicero, Yahoo People Finder, Google, Geocoder.us, and Mobile Commons.
• A custom list setting to store credentials and service priority, and a generic interface that helps select the geo service needed.
• Preliminary Visualforce UI.