I just found a tool that's pretty cool, and thought the folks here might be interested in it. The DC government, through the Office of the CTO, has created this windows application that lets anyone upload a file (excel or access) containing list of DC addresses, and it will append to your file information about those addresses, including what Ward it's in.
Most of the other data is a bit esoteric (closest police dept, voting precinct etc) but I know we've had several occasions where we wanted to have ward data handy, and zip codes and quadrants really don't cut it.
I'm thinking of adding this information to t_address using geo_area. We're still using the out-of-the-box values in tr_geo_area (which really means we're not using them at all.)
You can find it here: http://octo.dc.gov/node/715602 Look for "Download and install the MAR geocoder (.rar)". There's a user guide lower on the page.
Hope someone here find this useful!
This is very cool Brian!
Thank you for sharing!