A Flexible Addressing System for Approximate Geocoding.

Abstract

One of the most important features in an urban geographic information system is the ability to locate addresses, in any form employed by the population, in a quick and efficient way. From an organized set of georeferenced address data, local governments, infrastructure companies, and the various agents that need to work in urban spaces can reliably and precisely locate points of their interest, in fields of application as diverse as public health services, crime fighting, product distribution, postal delivery and many others. This activity is known as geocoding, which can be defined as the process of locating points on the surface of the Earth from alphanumeric addressing data associated to events. This paper shows how geocoding can be implemented over incomplete and possibly inaccurate addressing data (which is the prevailing situation in Brazilian cities) and how users can benefit from the results of such a process. A geocoding quality indicator is proposed, with the intention of providing an indication of the degree of certainty that is associated with each individual result of the geocoding process. This indicator can then be used in spatial analysis, by giving analysts the opportunity to include the uncertainty associated with the data in their work. This project is under development, and a set of (as yet unimplemented) geocoding tools is proposed and described in the paper.

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