Why geocode addresses

We encourage broad adoption of these materials for teaching and other professional development purposes, and invite you to customize them for your own needs. Need help with GIS in your research? We are here to help! Email the Scholarly Commons. It looks like you're using Internet Explorer 11 or older. This website works best with modern browsers such as the latest versions of Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge.

If you continue with this browser, you may see unexpected results. Search this Guide. Geocoding: What is Geocoding? Learn what geocoding is and how to geocode addresses, geographic coordinates, and place names using GIS software. What is Geocoding?

How Geocoding Works Choosing a Geocoder. Geocoding is the process of transforming a description of a location—such as a pair of coordinates, an address, or a name of a place—to a location on the earth's surface. You can geocode by entering one location description at a time or by providing many of them at once in a table. The resulting locations are output as geographic features with attributes, which can be used for mapping or spatial analysis. Single vs.

Batch Geocoding Single geocodes are when you simply need to find one address quickly. Reverse Geocoding Sometimes, you may have the points or the latitude and longitude values of locations, but you need to find the address of that location.

What is Geocoding Used For? Types of Geographic Location Descriptions When most people think of geocoding, they think of addresses. There are three basic types of geocoding location descriptions: Geographic Coordinates Place Names Addresses Geographic Coordinates The simplest type of geocoding is converting geographic coordinates in the form of latitude and longitude values or other types of mapping coordinates, into a GIS data format.

Place Names Place names are another common geographic entity that can be geocoded. Addresses Addresses are probably the most common location description, but also the most complex of geocoding entities. Contact the Scholarly Commons. Scholarly Commons. This can be done by simply looking at the information or using some of the analysis tools available with ArcGIS.

You can also display your address information based on certain parameters, allowing you to further analyze the information. A few of these applications are described in the sections that follow. With geocoded addresses, you can spatially display the address locations and begin to recognize patterns within the information.

This can be done by simply looking at the information or by using some of the analysis tools available with ArcGIS. The annual record of burglaries was initially created by geocoding a database table of burglaries that consisted of an address for each. The screen shots above show how the geocoded addresses were presented according to time, season, and day of the week to assist in crime prevention planning.

Additional analysis tools available in ArcGIS could be used to further analyze the information to identify patterns. Base data for this sample application was provided by Tele Atlas and Vexcel Corp. Geocoding acts as a crucial part of customer data management. Nearly every organization maintains address information for each customer or client.

This is usually in tabular format, containing the customer name, address, buying habits, and any other information you have collected. Geocoding allows you to take your customers' information and create a map of their locations. Using a variety of related applications, you can use this information in many ways, from establishing marketing strategies to targeting specific clusters of customers to producing route maps and directions.

The geocoded locations of your customers can be invaluable data. ArcLogistics is an application that uses geocoded addresses to optimally plan customer deliveries. You can use various methods to share your geocoding functionality. These include everything from collecting the address locators and sharing via a compressed file or compact disc to developing an online application, allowing users to do geocoding over the Internet. Many real estate firms have found advantages in distributing information about available real estate via the Internet.

By combining the database of available homes and ArcGIS Web services, you can distribute the spatial and nonspatial information about a home to a wide audience.

You can also specify a column to be used for country names if all are unique. In Builder: For country names, you can enter custom values by typing in the name if the data is within a single region or country. If your dataset consists of a column with postal codes, this option geocodes those values to generate location points. Your input data must be a text column.

You can also specify a column to be used as a country names, similar to the Administrative Regions option. Geocodes your data into a point geometry for a street address. You can specify the column to be used for the street addresses, in addition to the columns to be used for the city, state and country.