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.
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)
Value
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