PostGIS in Action, Third Edition

10 PostGIS TIGER geocoder

This chapter covers

• Geocoding
• Address standardization
• Reverse geocoding

What is a geocoder? It’s a utility that takes a textual representation of a street address and finds its geographic position using data such as street centerline geometries. The textual representation of an address often goes through a standardization process called address normalization or address standardization that takes the textual representation and breaks it into its component parts, such as street number, street name, suffix, and so on, and ensures that the same type of pieces are always represented in the same way. It is this standardized address that geocoders work with. Geocoders generally return the longitude and latitude.

In this chapter, ...