structured: Structured geocoding

In photon: High-Performance Geocoding using 'photon'

Structured geocoding

Description

Geocode a set of place information such as street, house number, or post code. Structured geocoding is generally more accurate but requires more information than unstructured geocoding.

You can use the helper function has_structured_support() to check if the current API supports structured geocoding. Structured geocoding should be enabled on the public photon instance and all photon instances >= 1.0.0, but older versions usually have structured queries disabled.

Usage

structured(
  .data,
  limit = 1,
  lang = "en",
  bbox = NULL,
  osm_tag = NULL,
  layer = NULL,
  locbias = NULL,
  locbias_scale = NULL,
  zoom = NULL,
  dedupe = TRUE,
  include = NULL,
  exclude = NULL,
  progress = interactive()
)

has_structured_support()

Arguments

.data	Dataframe or list containing structured information on a place to geocode. Can contain the columns street, housenumber, postcode, city, district, county, state, and countrycode. At least one of these columns must be present in the dataframe. Country names are automatically converted to ISO-2 codes where possible.
limit	Number of results to return. A maximum of 50 results can be returned for a single search term. Defaults to 1. When more than a single text is provided but limit is greater than 1, the results can be uniquely linked to the input texts using the idx column in the output.
lang	Language of the results. If "default", returns the results in local language.
bbox	Any object that can be parsed by st_bbox. Results must lie within this bbox.
osm_tag	Character string giving an OSM tag to filter the results by. See details.
layer	Character string giving a layer to filter the results by. Can be one of "house", "street", "locality", "district", "city", "county", "state", "country", or "other".
locbias	Numeric vector of length 2 or any object that can be coerced to a length-2 numeric vector (e.g. a list or sfg object). Specifies a location bias for geocoding in the format c(lon, lat). Geocoding results are biased towards this point. The radius of the bias is controlled through zoom and the weight of place prominence through location_bias_scale.
locbias_scale	Numeric vector specifying the importance of prominence in locbias. A higher prominence scale gives more weight to important places. Possible values range from 0 to 1. Defaults to 0.2.
zoom	Numeric specifying the radius for which the locbias is effective. Corresponds to the zoom level in OpenStreetMap. The exact relation to locbias is 0.25\text{ km} \cdot 2^{(18 - \text{zoom})}. Defaults to 16.
dedupe	If FALSE, keeps duplicates in the geocoding results. By default, photon attempts to deduplicate results that have the same name, postcode, and OSM value. Defaults to TRUE.
include, exclude	Character vector containing categories to include or exclude. Places will be included if any category in include is present. Places will be excluded if all categories in exclude are present.
progress	If TRUE, shows a progress bar for longer queries.

Details

Filtering by OpenStreetMap tags follows a distinct syntax explained on https://github.com/komoot/photon. In particular:

• Include places with tag: key:value

• Exclude places with tag: !key:value

• Include places with tag key: key

• Include places with tag value: :value

• Exclude places with tag key: !key

• Exclude places with tag value: :!value

Value

An sf dataframe or tibble containing the following columns:

• idx: Internal ID specifying the index of the texts parameter.

• osm_type: Type of OSM element, one of N (node), W (way), R (relation), or P (polygon).

• osm_id: OpenStreetMap ID of the matched element.

• country: Country of the matched place.

• city: City of the matched place.

• osm_key: OpenStreetMap key.

• countrycode: ISO2 country code.

• housenumber: House number, if applicable.

• postcode: Post code, if applicable.

• locality: Locality, if applicable.

• street: Street, if applicable.

• district: District name, if applicable.

• osm_value: OpenStreetMap tag value.

• name: Place name.

• type: Layer type as described for the layer parameter.

• extent: Boundary box of the match.

Examples

# check if structured() is supported
has_structured_support()

# structured() works on dataframes containing structurized data
place_data <- data.frame(
  housenumber = c(NA, "77C", NA),
  street = c("Falealilli Cross Island Road", "Main Beach Road", "Le Mafa Pass Road"),
  state = c("Tuamasaga", "Tuamasaga", "Atua")
)
structured(place_data, limit = 1)

# countries must be specified as iso2 country codes
structured(data.frame(countrycode = "ws"))

# traditional parameters from geocode() can also be used but are much more niche
structured(data.frame(city = "Apia"), layer = "house") # matches nothing

# structured geocoding can discern small differences in places
safune <- data.frame(
  city = c("Berlin", "Berlin"),
  countrycode = c("DE", "US")
)
structured(safune, limit = 1)

photon documentation built on April 10, 2026, 5:07 p.m.