Online Geocoder with interactive Map

Introduction

Geographic coordinates provide the unified way to identify any place on Earth. City streets could change their names and numbers, but the universal coordinate system, free of daily vanities and challenges of time, presents perpetual time-invariant values on a planetary level. Geographic coordinates system in general includes longitude, latitude and elevation (height), but the most used are the first and the second ones, namely longitude/latitude. They could be presented either in degrees:minutes:seconds (so-called DMS) format or decimal degrees (DD) format (used in the application).
 
Geographic coordinates could be obtained via global positioning system (GPS) devices, but this technique requires the physical presence at the point of interest. As an alternative, the geocoding software applications (or simply geocoder, or geo-locator) could be used to convert the postal addresses to the corresponding longitude/latitude pairs. Such geocoder has been built in conjunction with interactive online Map powered by Microsoft Bing™ technology, allowing different views, panorama and zooming; it is available online totally free at [1], serving both practical and didactic purposes (no registration is needed).

Usage

The usage is rather straightforward and intuitive: in order to obtain the longitude/latitude information and the map of the geographic point of interest, either in the US, or worldwide follow the steps described below:

1. Open web browser and navigate it to the Geocoder[^]
2. Enter the postal address into the search box and click on the "Find" screen button. Note: places in the US could be identified just by their ZIP (postal) code
3. Upon the completion of screen reload, which could take up to several seconds, you should be able to see the longitude/latitude of the point of interest and corresponding Bing map. You could select the preferred map view modes (road, aerial or bird’s eyes), adjust zoom level (from 1 to 19) and perform the panoramic function

Online geocoder has multi-lingual capabilities, accepting search queries in many foreign languages: Spanish, German, Italian, French, Russian, Greek, etc. Below are sample test results, corresponding to the world landmarks, entered in a search query in the language of origin:
 
1). Grand Central Terminal, NY: Longitude=-73.963429, Latitude=40.779423
2). Eiffel Tour, Champs De Mars: Longitude: 2.29507, Latitude: 48.857967
3). Brandenburger Tor, Unter Der Linden: Longitude: 13.389096, Latitude: 52.517198
4). Colosseo, Roma: Longitude: 12.493336, Latitude: 41.889957
5). Museo del Prado, Madrid: Longitude: -3.692524, Latitude: 40.413812
 
More reading on this topic available at [2,3]

References

1.Online Geocoder with Bing Map[^]
2.How to use online geocoders and interactive maps[^]
3.Interactive Map with 7-days forecast and Geocoder[^]

Sample Geocoder image

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York