Exploiting online sources to accurately geocode addresses

Many Geographic Information System (GIS) applications require the conversion of an address to geographic coordinates. This process is called geocoding. The traditional geocoding method uses a street vector data source, such as, Tigerlines, to obtain address range and coordinates of the street segment on which the given address is located. Next, an approximation technique is used to estimate the location of the given address using the address range of the selected street segment. However, this provides inaccurate results since the approximation assumes that properties exist at all possible addresses and all properties are of equal size. To address the inaccuracy of the traditional geocoding approach, we propose two new methods for geocoding using additional online data sources. The first method, the uniform-lotsize method, uses the number of addresses/lots present on the street segment to approximate the location of an address. The second method, the actual-lot-size method, takes into ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: GIS
• Authors: Rahul Bakshi, Craig A. Knoblock, Snehal Thakkar
• Keywords: Database, GIS 2004, Street Segment, Traditional Geocoding Approach, Traditional Geocoding Method