What open source software should I use to geocode the addresses?

Question

Need to geocode the student addresses using the regular 5-digit zip codes. Geocoder will give us an accurate point on the map, so in a Latitude and Longitude environment that should suffice for our specific data needs with respect to answering the question of what students belong to what congressional district. ArcGIS for Desktop software will geocode the student addresses and get points on the map. Then we need to create two other layers one for the representative districts and the other for the senate districts. Then we have to use the Spatial Join tool in the toolbox to combine the tables and give us one attribute table that includes all of our geocode located points and what congressional district they belong to.

So ArcGIS for desktop will be able to solve my puzzle, but is their any open GIS tool available which will solve this issue?

Answer 1

You can try Gisgraphy.

Gisgraphy is a free, open source framework that offers the possibility to do geolocalisation and geocoding via Java APIs or REST webservices. Because geocoding is nothing without data, it provides an easy to use importer that will automagically download and import the necessary (free) data to your local database (Geonames and OpenStreetMap : 42 million entries).