An ESRI ® White Paper • May 2009

ArcGIS® 9.3 Geocoding Technology

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ArcGIS 9.3 Geocoding Technology

An ESRI White Paper

Contents Page

The Geocoding Engine ......................................................................... 1

Supported Environments, Inputs, and Outputs ..................................... 2

Typical Deployment Scenarios and Performance................................. 2

Customization Options.......................................................................... 3

Data Sources, Functionality, and Quality ............................................. 3

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ArcGIS 9.3 Geocoding Technology

ESRI's ArcGIS® 9.3 geocoding engine is a proven, flexible, cross-
platform technology common to ArcGIS Desktop (including ArcGIS
Engine), ArcGIS Server, and ArcGISSM Online offerings. It supports
geocoding within any ArcGIS deployment scenario, including
ArcReader™, ArcMap™, and ArcCatalog™, and custom applications built
with the integrated development environment accessing ESRI's developer
components.

The ArcGIS 9.3 geocoding engine supports a rich set of geocoding styles that are
immediately usable for many addressing systems worldwide. In addition, it is fully
customizable, allowing you to build, publish, and share effective and focused address
locators that reflect custom rules, address types, and data sources. The ArcGIS 9.3
geocoding engine also allows you to build locators and gazetteers for nonaddress
descriptors—such as feature identifiers, codes, or names—a process that is beyond the
capability of traditional geocoders.

ESRI is continually adding new geocoding styles and data sources to its products and
Web offerings, and existing styles are continuously refined according to user feedback
and requirements. At ArcGIS 9.3.1, ArcGIS Server developers may also access
Microsoft's Virtual Earth™ geocoding environment, providing extra geographic coverage
for international geocoders.

The Geocoding The ArcGIS 9.3 geocoding engine is a general purpose record-matching processor. It is
Engine spatially aware and able to be tuned at build and run times to test agreement and
discriminate differences between input and reference data according to probabilistic rules
you define.

The principal elements of interest for the geocoding engine are the

„ Address locator
„ Reference data, which is typically embedded within an address locator

The address locator is an index structure that supports rapid execution of the matching
process your rule base supports and includes the underlying reference data—such as
street centerlines; address points; or any other point, line, or polygon feature class.

Reference data determines the spatial precision of geocodes. Point reference data
supports exact locations while linear reference data supports interpolated locations.
Tolerances and parameters within the geocoding process permit control over sensitivity
to spelling or alternate naming, or number agreement in address elements, thus allowing
the user to handle issues like local variability in addresses while using the same reference
data. By default, geocoded locations share the coordinate precision of the underlying
reference data, but this precision may be rounded if desired.

An address locator style has no dependency on a source of reference data; ESRI, its
business partners, and users around the world can use geocoding reference data or fully

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built locators from a variety of sources. These include user-created data, commercial
products from suppliers like Tele Atlas® and NAVTEQ®, and free reference data
downloaded from the Census TIGER 2008 site.

Address locators encapsulate one or more geocoding rule bases and reference datasets,
making them portable and distinct from the reference data itself, which when embedded
cannot be seen within a locator. Locators built with ArcGIS Desktop may be stored in
any ArcGIS workspace, file system, or geodatabase and managed with ArcGIS 9.3
standard administration tools.

Address locators may be simple (single step) or composite (multiple step), providing a
cascading hierarchy of geocode precision within the one ArcGIS process. Match
preferences may be set at run time, and match quality is recorded both as a flag for the
locator that provided the best geocode result and as a normalized score out of 100 for that
locator.

Supported Because geocoding is a core function of ArcGIS, the supported environments for address
Environments, locators are the same as any other data accessible by ArcGIS. ESRI's support site
Inputs, and Outputs contains detailed information on supported operating systems and database versions for
current and previous releases of ArcGIS.

Geocoding is normally performed on input tables, but GIS feature classes may also be
used as inputs. Input tabular data may be external to an ArcGIS workspace (for example,
from an OLE DB connection) or natively recognized by ArcGIS, such as CSV, dBASE
and Excel® files, or tables in any ArcGIS workspace format: ESRI's file geodatabase;
personal geodatabases (Microsoft® Access®); and personal, workgroup, and enterprise
geodatabases using a DBMS platform. ArcGIS Server additionally supports serialized
transmission of lightweight representations of tables and features when geocoding record
sets transported via the Web.

Geocoding processes normally output point feature classes, but optionally a standardized
representation of an input table may be written with address fields formatted according to
the rule base. Use cases for this include separating address components into a schema
useful for address labels.

The ArcGIS geocoding engine supports reverse geocoding, the process of finding an
address from a given x,y location. This is exposed in the user interface in ArcMap and is
available programmatically for desktop and Web APIs.

Typical Deployment ArcGIS 9.3 address locators support the same author-publish-use paradigm as data and
Scenarios and map products in ArcGIS. The ArcGIS Desktop applications, ArcMap and ArcCatalog,
Performance have menus and geoprocessing tools for creating locators in any workspace type.
Locators may then be copied or published as workspace-based resources for desktop
clients or published as ArcGIS Server geocoding services for consumption by Web
applications.

Geocoding may be an interactive or batch operation. Both deployment scenarios are

supported by ArcGIS Desktop 9.3 and Web client applications—an ArcGIS Desktop 9.3
application may geocode interactively or in batch mode using a workspace-based locator
or an ArcGIS Server geocoding service. An ArcGIS Server 9.3 Web application may
send individual geocoding requests or the equivalent of whole tables as record sets for
batch processing.

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Geocoding performance is highly data dependent and with many processing variables,
but for well-designed implementations of standard locator styles, users can expect to
achieve performance with the following orders of magnitude:

Geocoding Performance

Architecture Interactive Batch

ArcGIS Desktop Subsecond 2,250,000/hour
ArcGIS Server—Web client < 2 seconds 15,000/hour per process
ArcGIS Server—Local client Subsecond 2,000,000/hour per process

Customization ArcGIS 9.3 provides a set of platform-independent software components called

Options ArcObjects™, written in C++, with a wide variety of development environments
available. Technical resources you need to develop using the ArcGIS 9.3 platform
are now located within the ArcGIS Resource Centers; however, the ESRI® Developer
Network (EDNSM) site provides a useful entry point into technical Resource Center sites
for our APIs here, cross-referenced by application and development technology. ArcGIS
Desktop, ArcGIS Engine, and ArcGIS Server application areas are relevant to Software
Developer Kit (SDK) environments for geocoding, and ArcGIS Mobile can also access
ArcGIS Server geocoding functions executed server side.

Data Sources, ArcGIS 9.3 geocoding derives x,y coordinates from inputs using reference data. Data
Functionality, and errors are possible in the input and reference data; these can cause an undesirable result,
Quality such as failure to geocode or geocoding successfully to the wrong location. Because users
can often determine these data issues by inspection after geocoding, a rematch
dialog is provided for geocoded feature classes that may be used anytime to select and
repair unmatched or falsely matched feature selections individually or in bulk.

ESRI provides reference data from commercial suppliers such as NAVTEQ and
Tele Atlas. Commercial suppliers offer data with varying positional accuracy, for
example, postal code centroid, place location, or rooftop position or interpolated along a
street centerline. ESRI's address locators honor the precision and geometry of the
supplier's reference data, optionally with an offset for address parity (side of street) or
intersection (back along the street from an intersection), which may be desired for
cartographic purposes when using centerline reference sources.

Reference data represents a physical delivery point, and geocoding against that data
constitutes address validation of the input data. Address validation means that input
addresses are properly formed and the address actually exists.

Because geocoding results also contain the reference data values for address components,
ESRI geocoding supports address correction of misspellings, transpositions, house
number best approximations, and so on, understood by the probabilistic engine rules.

ESRI is able to supply geocoding engine rule bases that are not packaged with any of our
products; examples of these include single-line input rule bases for the United States,
Canada, and Europe, enabling the parsing and geocoding of address sentences rather than
address fields, much like the user experience of a search engine.

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