geocode: Georeferencing with Google
In dismo: Species Distribution Modeling

Description Usage Arguments Value Note Author(s) Examples

A wrapper around the Google geocoding web-service. It returns 0 to n matches. It is important to be as precise as possible, e.g. always include the country in the locality description.

The purpose of using this function should be to display the locations on a map in a browser. You should check the Google terms of use http://code.google.com/apis/maps/terms.html to see if your usage of this function (and the underlying Google API) is permitted.

1	geocode(x, oneRecord=FALSE, extent=NULL, progress='', ...)

`x`	A vector of locality descriptions
`oneRecord`	Logical. If `TRUE` a single record for each item in x is returned. If the API returned multiple records, the values of this record are computed by averaging the coordinates and taking the union of all bounding boxes
`extent`	An Extent object, or an object that can be coerced to one, to bias the search towards that region
`progress`	Character. Valid values are "" (no progress indicator), "text" or "window"
`...`	additional arguments (currently none implemeted)

data.frame with the following fields:

`originalPlace`	the locality description as provided (in argument `x`)
`interpretedPlace`	the locality as interpreted by the Google API
`lon`	longitude
`lat`	latitude
`lonmin`	minimum longitude of the bounding box
`lonmax`	maximum longitude of the bounding box
`latmin`	minimum latitude of the bounding box
`latmax`	maximum latitude of the bounding box
`uncertainty`	distance from `c(lon, lat)` to the farthest corner of the bounding box

It is important to compare fields originalPlace and interpretedPlace as the Google interpretation of a (perhaps vague) locality description can be very speculative

Robert J. Hijmans

## Not run: 
geocode(c('1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW, Washington DC', 'Luca, Italy', 'Kampala'))
geocode(c('San Jose', 'San Jose, Mexico'))
geocode(c('San Jose', 'San Jose, Mexico'), oneRecord=TRUE)

## End(Not run)