Find places

Place finding is the process of searching for a place name or POI to find its address and location.

In this tutorial, you will create a script to search and display different places around the Santa Monica Mountains area.

The ArcGIS World Geocoding Service can find addresses and places, convert addresses to coordinates, and perform batch geocoding. If you want to add POIs (Points of Interest) to your analytical workflows, you can search for places such as coffee shops, gas stations, or restaurants. To find places, use the geocode function and pass in a location and search category (e.g. "Coffee Shop").

You can then visualize the results on a map, manipulate the results in a Pandas Dataframe, and more.

Prerequisites

Steps

1. Add the following code to model a GIS portal and import the geocode function from the ArcGIS API for Python.

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   from arcgis.gis import GIS
   from arcgis.geocoding import geocode
   
   

2. Create an anonymous connection to ArcGIS Online. Since the results are not stored, you do not need credentials to call the geocoding service.

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   from arcgis.gis import GIS
   from arcgis.geocoding import geocode
   
   gis = GIS()
   
   

3. Pass the relevant parameters into the geocode function and get a FeatureSet as the result. In this example, the call requests the names, addresses, and locations of 25 coffee shops near a point in the Santa Monica Mountains. It also requests the results as a feature set so that they can be easily converted to a dataframe and mapped.

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   from arcgis.gis import GIS
   from arcgis.geocoding import geocode
   
   gis = GIS()
   
   geocoded_features = geocode(
       address=None,
       location=[-118.71511, 34.09042],
       category="Coffee shop",
       out_fields="Place_addr, PlaceName",
       max_locations=25,
       as_featureset=True,
   )
   
   

4. Convert the results to a Pandas Dataframe by calling the sdf property of a FeatureSet and show the first two locations.

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   from arcgis.gis import GIS
   from arcgis.geocoding import geocode
   
   gis = GIS()
   
   geocoded_features = geocode(
       address=None,
       location=[-118.71511, 34.09042],
       category="Coffee shop",
       out_fields="Place_addr, PlaceName",
       max_locations=25,
       as_featureset=True,
   )
   
   geocoded_df = geocoded_features.sdf
   geocoded_df.head(2)
   
   

5. Create a map to display the results.

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   from arcgis.gis import GIS
   from arcgis.geocoding import geocode
   
   gis = GIS()
   
   geocoded_features = geocode(
       address=None,
       location=[-118.71511, 34.09042],
       category="Coffee shop",
       out_fields="Place_addr, PlaceName",
       max_locations=25,
       as_featureset=True,
   )
   
   geocoded_df = geocoded_features.sdf
   geocoded_df.head(2)
   
   m = gis.map()
   m
   
   

6. Once the map has loaded, draw the results.

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   from arcgis.gis import GIS
   from arcgis.geocoding import geocode
   
   gis = GIS()
   
   geocoded_features = geocode(
       address=None,
       location=[-118.71511, 34.09042],
       category="Coffee shop",
       out_fields="Place_addr, PlaceName",
       max_locations=25,
       as_featureset=True,
   )
   
   geocoded_df = geocoded_features.sdf
   geocoded_df.head(2)
   
   m = gis.map()
   m
   
   m.center = [34.09042, -118.71511]
   m.zoom = 11
   m.draw(geocoded_features)