Introducing Geographic Information Systems with ArcGIS: A Workbook Approach to Learning GIS, 3rd Edition

More to Know—More Information Available

There is much, much more to know about address geocoding, but you have the basic idea. Addresses in text form can be used to create geographic coordinate points. The next step, which we won’t undertake, would be to convert files of many addresses. To refer back to the example I used in the Overview—suppose that you have a file of thousands of addresses on crime reports. You might like to see where, on a map, these events occurred. You can submit this file to the software and get a map of the events.

Problems occur when an address yields no geographic point, or when an address presents you with two or more possible points. The address geocoding software is sophisticated. For example, when there are multiple possibilities, the software provides you with a “score” that tells you how good a match the input address is with what’s in the database.

To learn more, read Geocoding in ArcGIS, which exists as a paper manual available from Esri, or as a PDF (Portable Document Format) file.21 The filename is Geocoding_in_ArcGIS. You may find it in a folder named Esri_Library\ArcGIS_Desktop.

19If you are interested in geographically augmented street data for your city, it is available free from the Esri Web site. It comes in zipped-up shapefile format, so getting to it requires a few steps, but keep in mind the word “free.” (These steps were detailed in Chapter 6, Exercise 6-4 (Combining Demographic and Geographic Data) where you retrieved TIGER data ...