Geocoding

Geocoding is the process of finding geographic coordinates (such as latitude and longitude) for a given feature, expressed as, for example, place name, street address, or postal zip code. Geocoding is useful in many applications, such as responding to emergency calls, mapping and analyzing information from text sources (such as terrorist incidents reported in newspapers), or finding directions to an address. A geocoding process normally has three components:

• 1.
  The input features to be geocoded, which are specified as addresses or place names
• 2.
  A reference database, which contains a comprehensive collection of addresses or place names and their corresponding coordinates
• 3.
  The matching procedure, which finds each input feature in the reference database and retrieves its coordinates

Among the above three components, the organization and structure of the ...